Peer Review: It has a Past; Does It Have a Future?

Alvin M. Saperstein
Emeritus Professor of Physics
Wayne State University, aa1604@wayne.edu

I have always thought of “peer review” as an enduring foundation for all of “science”. But a recent article in the June 23, 2018 issue of The Economist, titled “Publish and Don’t Be Denied: Some Science Journals that claim to peer review papers do not do so” has left me somewhat doubtful as to its eventual endurance.

As a physics graduate student and young researcher, I was only familiar with APS Journals. Through them, and via hard experience, I learned what “peer review” meant. It was the means to guarantee that only competent — not necessarily excellent — papers were published to enter the public domain of “real science”. Later on, I learned of the existence of some non-APS journals, non-American and/or commercially published research and review journals, which I also presumed to be peer reviewed. There were comparatively few physics journals in those days, all supported by subscriptions that were affordable to libraries and individual physicists. But publishing costs have gone up, and the demand for “open access” to journal articles has spread and been widely accepted. With the demise of subscription support, alternate means of financing publication costs must be found, and that alternative is usually “page charges” — “pay us, per page, and we’ll publish your paper” — perhaps without the road block and time delay of peer review.

During my professional lifetime there has been an explosion in the number of active research scientists and in the number of — supposedly — research journals. The path to career advancement and security is the publication of research papers: the more, the merrier. There seems to be a growing number of journals that will further individual careers by accepting page charges rather than demanding the expense and the delay of peer review. And fewer institutions, reviewing their researchers for support and/or advancement, seem to be concerned within which type of journal the pertinent research has appeared. (Often the review is done by “administrators” rather than fellow researchers. The Economist article also describes several “experiments” in which “fake” articles are included in the vita under review.)

Several scholars, cited in this Economist paper, have compiled “whitelists” – journals that significantly rely on peer review – and “blacklists” – those that do not. One blacklist contains 12,000 journals. One estimate in this Economist article is that the number of articles published in questionable journals has risen from 53,000 per year in 2010 to more than 400,000 today. An estimated 6% of academic papers by American researchers are published in “non-white” journals.

The rise in the number of such articles and the size of the “blacklist” indicates that there “is money to be made” from page charges — for both “white” and “black” journals. The growing number of the latter includes those who adopt appearance similar to the more respected ones and/or include the names of respected scientists on their editorial boards, often without the knowledge or consent of the named individuals. The growing demand for ever-larger academic vita, the shrinking of library budgets, and the insistence of governmental funding bodies for open access makes it unlikely that we’ll soon go back to a subscription-based universal peer reviewed scientific publishing system.

One possible alternative, currently used by parts of the world physics community, is open-web publishing. Anyone can submit anything — dross or gold — to those lists; let the reader search for value. The problem with this approach is that each reader has to do his/her own search in ignorance of the effort put in by other readers. If there were a means for those other readers to enter their comments in the same list location, this would be a form of “peer review” — open or closed, depending upon whether the reviewer identification was included. Of course, if the initial article submitter is offered a chance to respond to these “peer” comments, the result would be a “discussion board” or blog which might grow indefinitely. So, there has to be a role for an ultimate editor/”peer reviewer” — and who is to pay for that?

These contributions have not been peer-refereed. They represent solely the view(s) of the author(s) and not necessarily the view of APS.