Engaging in quality technical peer review as an international professional responsibility: those who publish confidently must also review competently

Abstract

Quality peer-review remains central to current international scientific and technical publishing and proposal assessment methods. As incompetent review and perceived bias remain the most cited problems with peer review processes commonly employed in scientific review of manuscript and proposals, the creation and maintenance of quality pools of engaged, responsive and qualified peer reviewers is essential to scientific publishing and dissemination. An important operational principle for the peer reviewing system is that all who utilize this publishing system should then also review a commensurate load on behalf of the system. This would also imply that those who compose and submit technical manuscripts are competent to assess and levy fair criticism of other’s work in their field. Given the large and rapid expansion in numbers of submitted manuscripts from non-traditional sources, including many developing countries, expansion of the peer-reviewing pool to these sources is necessary both to accommodate their respective, newly imposed reviewing burdens on the already over-burdened system, and to engage new communities in the traditional process of vetting and validating scientific and technical works. Effective peer review must enforce the many elements of reviewer technical proficiency, professional conduct, bias and ethics considerations, and responsibility in this process and the competitive international system in which it sits. Reviewers require training, oversight, control, expectations, and continual guidance. Validation of peerreview’s overall efficacy requires follow-on policing of published literature to assert its accuracy and content through consensus and experimental reproduction. As former developing countries now contribute increasing numbers of new manuscripts to the technical peer-review system, they should also actively seek to officially train such contributors to also be visible, effective peer-reviewers for international journals, editors and funding agencies. This is not a passive endeavor, requiring expectations, recruitment and training, and the associated resources to make accommodations as rapidly as their contributions are encumbered within the current publishing systems. Collective responsibilities as researchers, contributors, reviewers, readers and enforcers of the integrity and safekeeping of this essential quality control process traditionally rely on individual professional integrity and conscientious effort. Extension of this effort to continually recruit new pools of competent, trained and qualified reviewers in the current publishing era is essential.