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We presented three common complaints about peer review at top-tier journals to editors at some of those journals. Here are their responses:
Complaint: Editors at commercial journals are young and inexperienced, relative to editors at nonprofit or society journals. As a result, commercial journal editors (such as those at Nature or Cell) often make errors in judgment when sorting through conflicting reviewers' reports, or choose reviewers with obvious conflicts of interest, causing worthy papers to be rejected, or unworthy papers to be accepted.
Responses: It's true that editors at commercial journals are almost always younger than editors at nonprofit or society journals, says Hemai Parthasarathy, managing editor at Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology. She was once a young editor at Nature and admits that she likely made mistakes in judgment then that she wouldn't make now. However, after 10 years of editing, she notes that editors of any age can make mistakes. "Anybody can make the mistake of failing to see the promise of a paper, and sending it to the wrong people," she says. Indeed, Drummond Rennie, deputy editor at Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), says he is in his 60s but has received complaints that he was too young to edit an article.
While some older scientists may have more experience in writing papers, they also have likely formed stronger opinions and networks of scientists, which are not necessarily good things, says Parthasarathy. Young editors have the opportunity to judge work on its merits, not on whether it agrees with their colleagues. "What one group is calling experience, another calls incestuousness, or bias," she says.
Bernd Pulverer, the editor at Nature Cell Biology, estimates that editors at his journal and at Nature are, on average, in their mid-30s, and they have invariably done at least one postdoc. He says that the Nature journals often receive criticisms that editors have too much power and lack the experience to make sound decisions. However, the authors leveling those attacks likely don't realize how little influence individual editors have, Pulverer notes. Editors discuss manuscripts among themselves before peer review, he says, and when there's disagreement, they may "informally" ask outside scientists to weigh in. Editors also consult each other when they receive conflicting reviewers' comments, or send conflicting comments back to the reviewers for further comment, he adds. When an author receives a rejection note, it may appear to be the unilateral decision of a young editor, when in reality, "It's not just the single editor that's making the decisions," Pulverer says.
Cell did not return requests for comment.
Complaint: Journals with sister publications (e.g., Nature's family of publications, JAMA's Archives journals, Cell's Neuron ) sometimes send strong papers worthy of publication in primary, bigger-profile journals to sister journals to increase the smaller publications' profiles.
Response: Drummond Rennie, deputy editor at JAMA, says editors will recommend that authors submit a paper that's too specialized to one of the journal's sister publications, but that does not guarantee the paper will be accepted. He adds that JAMA and its sister publications compete with each other, and if a strong paper comes to JAMA, the journal will not pass it on. In all his years, Rennie says he's never heard of a journal giving up a strong study to help its sister publication.
Complaint: Peer reviewers sometimes delay responding to or otherwise sabotage papers about studies that compete with the reviewers' own work.
Responses: Jeffrey Drazen, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, notes that incidents in which peer reviewers sabotage work are the "extreme exception." To keep tabs on reviewers, the journal rates them with a letter grade, which factors in timeliness and quality of the review. "We try to avoid using reviewers whom we feel do not provide critical and useful evaluations," he says. To maintain a list of qualified reviewers, the journal "constantly updates" a database of close to 10,000 physicians worldwide with different areas of expertise, Drazen notes.
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