Dear All,
Whether you belong to the ‘POP’ (Publish or Perish) world or you
just publish for professional keeping-up-to-date and personal satisfaction, you
are a stakeholder in how journals choose their peer reviewers and ofcourse who
they send your submission to for peer review. Whether you send articles to
journals with high rejection rates, which also tend to have high impact factors,
more stringent policies for accepting to publish and therefore to be regarded
as “prestigious” or you send papers to the so-called mega-journals that aim to
publish all sound science, you are a stakeholder and you will like to
contribute to the on-going peer reviewer debate: Read Liz Wager’s blog below
and lets know your own views:
‘Liz Wager: How
much of a conflict of interest is too much for a peer reviewer?
April 10, 2017
One
of the conundrums of peer review is that reviewers need to be knowledgeable
about the research being reported but shouldn’t have conflicts of interest. The
trouble is that the best-qualified people are often too closely connected to
either the research or the authors. This problem is amplified in small research
fields and for journals publishing in languages that not many people speak.
While it’s fairly easy to find an English-speaking cardiologist completely
unconnected to a trial and its authors, it’s far more tricky to find, let’s
say, an expert on Mediterranean fish stocks who can review articles in
Croatian.
I
review for several journals on the relatively little-studied area of peer
review and publication ethics. This small research field gets published in a
funny mix of journals (including ones on clinical medicine, ethics, and
information science) so I get review requests from a wide range of journals.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that these journals have different policies on how
much of a conflict of interests is too much for a reviewer. So, if I point out
to some editors that I have co-published with one of the authors a few years
ago, one editor may say that’s not a problem, while other journals will
immediately say they don’t want me to review in that case.
I
reckon (but without any data or systematic study to prove it) that highly
selective journals (i.e. those with high rejection rates, which also tend to
have high impact factors and therefore to be regarded as “prestigious”) have
more stringent policies than the so-called mega-journals that aim to publish
all sound science. (The BMJ Editors will probably howl at me
that The BMJ and BMJ Open operate identical
policies, but you know what they say about exceptions proving the rule.)
Thinking about it, this may make sense, as these two types of journal are using
peer review for different functions. If you are advising a journal about
whether an article should be published, and if publication in that journal is
viewed as a big prize by authors (and their institutions), then your potential
to improve or damage the authors’ careers (or the sponsor’s profits) is greater
than if you are only suggesting ways to improve the article, and the journal’s
default position is to publish it.
Then
there is the question of whether the peer review is anonymous or signed, and
whether the reviewer is told the author’s identity. If I’m not told a
submission is from a deadly rival (and I can’t reasonably be expected to guess
who the authors are), perhaps this rivalry doesn’t matter? If the review is
published alongside the article so readers can judge the fairness of the
comments, does this reduce the potential harm of reviewers’ competing interests
(at least for accepted articles)? Or, if the journal is enlightened enough to
blind reviewers to the findings (so they comment on the soundness of the
methods without seeing the results) then maybe the need to worry about
conflicts of interest shrinks even further (but never disappears
entirely—nobody should be asked to review the work of their children or
partner).
To
be honest, I’m not sure if we should be worried if journals use different
criteria for disqualifying peer reviewers, but it might be good if journals
published their policies so readers, authors, and potential reviewers could see
them. Or maybe we need debate and then a guideline on this (as you may know, I
love guidelines)—but we’d have to be careful who we asked to review it.''
Joseph Ana
Africa Center for Clin Gov Research & Patient Safety
@ HRI West Africa Group - HRI WA
Consultants in Clinical Governance Implementation
Publisher: Health and Medical Journals
8 Amaku Street Housing Estate, Calabar
Cross River State, Nigeria
Cross River State, Nigeria
Phone No. +234 (0) 8063600642
Visit Website: www.hriwestafrica.com
E-mail: hriwestafrica@gmail.com
E-mail: hriwestafrica@gmail.com
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