Does peer review work? Is peer review broken? The vast majority of authors believe it improves their final work, and since it’s evolving from this solid base, it’s clearly not broken. But before we can have a useful discussion about its purpose and effectiveness, we need to agree on which approach to peer review we’re talking about, then whether our expectations of it are reasonable and accurate.

So-called “post-publication peer review” is an interesting animal in its own right. As I’ve written about before, there are many problems with equating commenting with peer-review, including a lack of pre-qualification and no central evaluative authority or accountability. And it’s nothing new, in a sense. The most basic form of post-publication peer-review is called “reading.” A more involved version is called “a discussion” or “a journal club.” The more elaborate version yet is called “science.” Those who want to capture it in computer code are making essential trade-offs, many of which we don’t understand completely yet. One of these is the cost of entry into public post-publication peer-review systems — the effort it entails, the risk for publicly being shamed for saying something ill-advised or clearly wrong, and the lack of actual give-and-take. Again, post-publication peer-review is not one thing, and just because you capture some aspect of it in commenting software doesn’t mean you’ve done anything much.

Here are some variables around peer-review we have to understand before we know what kind of peer review we’re actually talking about: Is it blinded? If it is blinded, is it single-blinded or double-blinded? Is there statistical or methodological review in addition to external peer-review? Are the peer reviewers truly experts in the field or a more general assemblage of individuals? What are the promises and goals of the peer review process? What type of disclosure of financial or other potential competing interests is made? Are reviewers aware of these? Is there a senior editor of some sort involved along with outside peer reviewers? Is the peer-review “inherited” from another body, such as a committee or a preceding journal process (e.g., in “cascading” title situations or when expert panels have been involved)? Are there two tiers of peer review within the same journal’s practices? Is the peer-review done at the article level or at the corpus level (as happens with some supplements)? Is plagiarism-detection software used as part of the process? Are figures checked for manipulation? Is the peer reviewer graded by a senior editor as part of an internal evaluation and improvement process?

prevented you from

Can you think of a time when you were pretty sure about what the right thing to do was, but you didn’t do it?

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you will be sent

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you

you

your

your

your

ethical challenges.

After all, don’t we tend to examine our motivations for doing something only when we have reason to doubt that we are doing the right thing?

It also doesn’t lessen the value and the potential power of the example one sets for others.

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possible actions and outcomes

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Step 3: My Initial Read

Feel free to share your observations and thoughts with others below before moving on to the next exercise.

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must

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (SHARE YOUR ANSWERS BELOW IN THE COMMENTS SECTION)

A final exercise will challenge you to bring the skills you hone through this process to bear on a complex scenario involving several ethical issues.

This later formulation points to the beginning of an important transformation of the public sphere as it moved from being a space of public authority to one in which private citizens came together to form publics capable of holding public authorities accountable.

A fundamental task for public philosophy is to attend to the work the public is doing in developing its own self-conception.