Open access is tiring out peer reviewers : Nature News & Comment

"Scientists like to complain about peer review. No researcher wants to be told that their work is flawed, unworthy or just plain wrong. But in recent months, I received reviews of my own submitted papers that suggest reviewers simply did not read the manuscript properly.  This is not nitpicking over matters of opinion or interpretation. In one instance, a reviewer complimented the double-blind placebo-controlled nature of our study, and made methodological comments related to that. Yet the study was not placebo controlled. In fact, participants were randomly assigned to three different active treatments. That is a serious mistake and undermines the supposed internal quality control of the peer-review system.

Conversations with colleagues reveal similar concerns about peer-review quality, and suggest that the scale of the problem has increased over the past few years. These are anecdotal reports, but they do raise a serious question: as the number of academic papers and scientific journals published continues to grow, can the peer-review system cope?  The migration of scholarly journals from print to digital increases the burden on reviewers. Online publications have no page budgets or print costs, and so can publish as much as they like. Once, this process was managed by editors who would decide whether to send a paper out for review, or to simply reject it. This system had its own disadvantages but it seemed to keep the total number of papers that required review at a manageable level. The default option for many online journals seems to be to send all submissions out for review. The rise of the open-access (OA) movement compounds this effect. The business case for online OA journals, to which authors pay submission fees, works best at high volume. And for many of these journals, submitted work is published as long as it is methodologically sound. It does not have to demonstrate, for example, the novelty or societal relevance that some traditional journals demand ..."