einstein (São Paulo). 01/Jul/2014;12(3):7-15.

Paying reviewers for scientific papers and ethical committees

DOI: 10.1590/S1679-45082014ED3259

Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, says peer review is hard to define in operational terms,⁽⁾ but that almost everybody agrees that it is at the heart of the practice of science. There are many ways of doing it. The editor, for example, can send the paper to two friends who are or are not aware of the subject. If both are favorable to publication of the paper, it will be published. If both advise against publication the editor makes a decision or sends the paper to a third friend to settle the issue (when editors begin their career they have many friends, but they end up losing a lot of them after some time in the business). In Smith’s paper on peer review published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, he mentions Robbie Fox, a former editor of the Lancet, who was no admirer of peer review system and who joked that the Lancet chooses articles to publish by throwing all papers received down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom. In addition, Dr Smith stated that “a systematic review of all evidence on peer review concluded that the practice of peer review is based mostly in faith rather than facts…”

We all know the problems with peer review. It is slow: those who agree to do it, do so in their free time. Most of reviewers do not have a lot of free time, as they are overwhelmed with requests for do more peer review among other tasks. It’s inconsistent: some papers submitted to one journal are considered excellent, whereas in other journals are not even considered to be peer reviewed. Many biases exist and they are not prevented by anonymous review. In fact, if reviewers are well chosen and are in the right area, they can easily identify authors or at least the institution where they work. Some authors have a personal style, and if you read the paper you will be able to identify them. If authors are from less prestigious institutions – for instance, being in Latin America rather than in a developed nation – there is the Matthew effect: “to those who have all, all shall be given; to those that have not, the little they have will be taken from them”. In other words, people from those institutions and individuals not known to the reviewers have more difficulties getting published. Negative results are hard to publish, even when they confront conventional knowledge, i.e., things everybody knows are correct, but have never been, and sometimes they are not that actually correct.

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