Should Authors Submit Previous Peer-Review Reports When Submitting Research Papers? Views of General Medical Journal Editors

Jochen W. L. Cals; Christian D. Mallen; Liam G. Glynn; Daniel Kotz

doi:10.1370/afm.1448

Published eLetters

If you would like to comment on this article, click on Submit a Response to This article, below. We welcome your input.

Submit a Response to This Article

Compose eLetter

Title *

Author Information

Contributors
First Name and Middle Initial * First or given name, e.g. 'Peter'. Last Name * Your last, or family, name, e.g. 'MacMoody'. Email Address * Your email address, e.g. higgs-boson@gmail.com Occupation * Your role and/or occupation, e.g. 'Orthopedic Surgeon'. Affiliation * Your organization or institution (if applicable), e.g. 'Royal Free Hospital'.

Statement of Competing Interests

Competing interests? *

Yes

Please describe the competing interests

CAPTCHA

This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

What code is in the image? *

Enter the characters shown in the image.

Vertical Tabs

Jump to comment:

Could a central review repository improve peer review?
Joshua J. Fenton

Published on: 20 March 2013

Published on: (20 March 2013)
Page navigation anchor for Could a central review repository improve peer review?
Could a central review repository improve peer review?
Joshua J. Fenton, Associate Professor
A central repository of reviews may be advantageous to the peer review process. Journals could potentially require authors and reviewers to allow reviews to be submitted to the repository, where both reviews and authors' responses would be available for subsequent journals to use. If subsequent journals solicit additional reviews, the repository would accumulate multiple perspectives on a single paper, increasing the po...
Show More

A central repository of reviews may be advantageous to the peer review process. Journals could potentially require authors and reviewers to allow reviews to be submitted to the repository, where both reviews and authors' responses would be available for subsequent journals to use. If subsequent journals solicit additional reviews, the repository would accumulate multiple perspectives on a single paper, increasing the poor inter-rater reliability of the typical two-reviewer assessment.1 A repository may also motivate reviewers to accept review requests, because they'd know that their review would be useful to the universe of journals rather than a single journal. By rating the quality of reviews over time, journal editors would develop a strong dataset regarding reviewer expertise and discrimination. Advantages to authors may be more rapid time from initial submission to publication and ultimately a more reliable review process.
The downsides of such a system would need evaluation. Probably some good manuscripts would go unpublished because of initial negative but erroneous reviews. But this already may occur frequently in the current system because busy authors may give up on good papers after one or more rejections. Editors may also believe that their journals need specific rather than generic reviews, but the advantages of efficiency and reliability may outweigh lack of specificity.
References
1. Kravitz RL, Franks P, Feldman MD, Gerrity M, Byrne C, et al. (2010) Editorial Peer Reviewers' Recommendations at a General Medical Journal: Are They Reliable and Do Editors Care? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10072. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010072
Competing interests: None declared
Show Less

Competing Interests: None declared.