Dur. 1st rev. rnd
Tot. handling time
Imm. rejection time
Num. rev. reports
Report quality
Overall rating
Outcome
Year
Immediately accepted after 4.3 weeks
Accepted (im.)
2014
Motivation:
Dear F1000 Research Team,
First, I would like to thank all of you who worked so dilligently on our manuscript, which was "accepted" in December 2014 and after 34 referee referrals remains in "peer review purgatory" and unlisted on PubMed. Had we understood the peer review nightmare that this process would entail, my coauthors and I would never have submitted our study to your journal. As it is, I would like to offer a post-mortem for this process in the hope that you will change it.
At its best, peer review offers three main benefits. First, it allows investigators to improve on their reports based on the insight of objective referees. Second, it provides independent evaluation of the scientific work that is reviewed. And third, it gives journal editors the discretion to judge that work according to the validity of the reviews.
F1000 Research uses an open peer review process designed to be uniform, transparent and theoretically unbiased. Referees should have "sufficient experience and expertise, be impartial and active in the field, and not have collaborated with the main authors in the past three years." Furthermore, there is no editorial oversight of the peer review process: No editor holds referees accountable for their reviews or judges the validity of those reviews. To put it bluntly, nobody is in charge of the peer review process.
All of this works very nicely with a non-controversial scientific topic. Unfortunately, your system fails miserably with a polemic subject like the one in our article (sexual transmission of Lyme disease). First, referees are chosen based on a system that excludes positive reviewers who have worked with the authors, leaving less qualified and/or oppositional referees to make scientifically unsound and/or politically motivated judgments of the article. Since there is no accountability on the part of the referees, these judgments cannot be negated or overcome by editing the manuscript and refuting the review. Second, since all opinions (including reader comments) are freely available on the journal website, independent review of the article goes out the window, and referees become reluctant to "buck the trend" of negative reviews. Third, since there is no editorial oversight of the peer review process, invalid reviews maintain their effect even after they are refuted, and the chance of obtaining a positive review becomes virtually nil. And finally, since the article has been "published" online, it cannot be withdrawn and submitted to another journal that would perform valid independent peer review and get it listed on PubMed.
Although I am sure that your open peer review system had good intentions, the nightmare that we have endured with this perverted system is frankly worse than any experience in all my years of publishing scientific articles. I would certainly not encourage my peers to submit a manuscript to your journal unless this broken system is fixed. I hope that you will accept this criticism in the positive spirit that was intended and change the system.
First, I would like to thank all of you who worked so dilligently on our manuscript, which was "accepted" in December 2014 and after 34 referee referrals remains in "peer review purgatory" and unlisted on PubMed. Had we understood the peer review nightmare that this process would entail, my coauthors and I would never have submitted our study to your journal. As it is, I would like to offer a post-mortem for this process in the hope that you will change it.
At its best, peer review offers three main benefits. First, it allows investigators to improve on their reports based on the insight of objective referees. Second, it provides independent evaluation of the scientific work that is reviewed. And third, it gives journal editors the discretion to judge that work according to the validity of the reviews.
F1000 Research uses an open peer review process designed to be uniform, transparent and theoretically unbiased. Referees should have "sufficient experience and expertise, be impartial and active in the field, and not have collaborated with the main authors in the past three years." Furthermore, there is no editorial oversight of the peer review process: No editor holds referees accountable for their reviews or judges the validity of those reviews. To put it bluntly, nobody is in charge of the peer review process.
All of this works very nicely with a non-controversial scientific topic. Unfortunately, your system fails miserably with a polemic subject like the one in our article (sexual transmission of Lyme disease). First, referees are chosen based on a system that excludes positive reviewers who have worked with the authors, leaving less qualified and/or oppositional referees to make scientifically unsound and/or politically motivated judgments of the article. Since there is no accountability on the part of the referees, these judgments cannot be negated or overcome by editing the manuscript and refuting the review. Second, since all opinions (including reader comments) are freely available on the journal website, independent review of the article goes out the window, and referees become reluctant to "buck the trend" of negative reviews. Third, since there is no editorial oversight of the peer review process, invalid reviews maintain their effect even after they are refuted, and the chance of obtaining a positive review becomes virtually nil. And finally, since the article has been "published" online, it cannot be withdrawn and submitted to another journal that would perform valid independent peer review and get it listed on PubMed.
Although I am sure that your open peer review system had good intentions, the nightmare that we have endured with this perverted system is frankly worse than any experience in all my years of publishing scientific articles. I would certainly not encourage my peers to submit a manuscript to your journal unless this broken system is fixed. I hope that you will accept this criticism in the positive spirit that was intended and change the system.