A suggestion for eLife

peter.suber's bookmarks 2023-03-21

Summary:

"I have a simple suggestion for how to counteract such a concern, and that is that the journal should adopt a different criterion for deciding which papers to review – this should be done solely on the basis of the introduction and methods, without any knowledge of the results. Editors could also be kept unaware of the identity of authors.

 

If eLife wants to achieve a distinctive reputation for quality, it could do so by only taking forward to review those articles that have identified an interesting question and tackled it with robust methodology. It’s well-known that editors and reviewers tend to be strongly swayed by novel and unexpected results, and will disregard methodological weaknesses if the findings look exciting. If authors had to submit a results-blind version of the manuscript in the first instance, then I predict that the initial triage by editors would look rather different.  The question for the editor would no longer be one about the kind of review the paper would generate, but would focus rather on whether this was a well-conducted study that made the editor curious to know what the results would look like.  The papers that subsequently appeared in eLife would look different to those in its high-profile competitors, such as Nature and Science, but in a good way.  Those ultra-exciting but ultimately implausible papers would get filtered out, leaving behind only those that could survive being triaged solely on rationale and methods."

Link:

https://deevybee.blogspot.com/2023/03/a-suggestion-for-elife.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.elife oa.recommendations oa.preprints oa.open_peer_review oa.business_models oa.quality oa.prestige oa.gold oa.journals

Date tagged:

03/21/2023, 08:39

Date published:

03/21/2023, 04:40