Katie Ridd, senior editor at the renowned journal Nature Communications, made a slip of the tongue during a presentation a few months ago.
She described the usual peer review process of her company as a “stamp of authority” and then immediately corrected herself. She actually wanted to say “stamp of credibility”.
This irony has certainly not escaped the attention of those researchers in the audience who would like to publish in "Nature" and have perhaps already been rejected there. The real benefits of peer review have been debated for too long; what editors expect from having two to three external, anonymous and unpaid reviewers (ideally from the right subject) decide on the quality of submitted studies.
The review itself must finally be put to the test, say the critics.
Young people in particular are pushing for reforms.
Anyone who is studying today and would like to do research later faces an extremely competitive job market.
Journals with overburdened reviewers and a poor selection process can become a bottleneck for professional advancement.
In Berlin, the newly founded "Berlin Exchange Medicine" (BEM) recently merged with two other German student journals from the humanities and social sciences to form a network that is unique in Europe.
"We show what else happens in the black box of publishers"
Instead of simply imitating the established publications with their student journal, they want to counter them with a small utopia. The three founders, Anne Neumann, Felix Hambitzer and Dario von Wedel, say that it is easier to muster up this courage during your studies. Nevertheless, they claim to enforce their own ideas of peer review until one day researchers demand them as a matter of course. With this declaration of war, they were the first student project to even receive funding from the Berlin University Alliance.
It is no coincidence that three medical students came up with the idea. In the life sciences, peer review has been discussed even more controversially than before since the beginning of the corona pandemic. The conventional process keeps findings under lock and key for several months, and in the event of a rejection, the review begins anew while the submitters allow themselves to be handed down by high-quality journals. Even in the respected journal The Lancet, which has a long tradition of peer review, some grossly incorrect studies make it into the magazine.
If, on the other hand, the draft is made public before submission (as a so-called preprint) and provided with a red warning ("provisional", "not yet reported in the media"), the entire networked professional community can intervene as a supervisory authority.
Given the large number of readers, a flawed corona study could never go unchallenged on Twitter for long.
Revision of the manuscript visible to all
This network character, which unfortunately also harbors the risk of getting bogged down, is now also being implemented at “Berlin Exchange Medicine”, but it goes one step further here.
Even the research question and the planned method should be put up for discussion after editorial approval.
Criticism before data collection helps the most, "before the child has fallen into the well," says Dario von Wedel.
Later, the preprint will be posted on the website for joint review.
The many documented personal attacks suggest that anonymous reviewers find their job in the old system rather thankless.
In his report, one of them criticized entire research areas, the other against women.
With BEM, on the other hand, you should only comment with the real name.
The twenty members of the editorial board trained themselves in a self-organized course, since they are not taught peer review at their universities. If the reports are publicly available, as is the case with BEM, they can refer to each other and enter into dialogue with the authors of the study. In the end, all versions, feedback and correspondence are collected in a graphically appealing final version. The revision of the manuscript is thus comprehensible for everyone.
"We show what otherwise happens in the black box of the publishers," says Anne Neumann, and that's still a modest statement: A platform like BEM can raise scientific exchange to a new level.
However, this requires students from all life science subjects who find the time to support foreign research, even if it is only with a short piece of advice.
And who are willing to stand up for their criticism with their name.