A colleague once told me that they only review three papers per year and then refuse any further requests for reviewing. Her reasoning was as follows: I publish one paper a year (on average) This paper incurs three peer reviews Therefore, I owe “the system” three reviews. It’s difficult to fault this logic. However, I think that as a senior scientist with a wealth of experience, the system would benefit greatly from more of her input.

Regulars will remember that nearly two years ago, I reviewed a paper for the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters , recommended acceptance with only trivial changes (as did both other reviewers) and was astonished to see that it was rejected outright. There was an invitation to resubmit, with wording that made it clear that the resubmission would be treated as a brand new manuscript;

At GigaScience , one of our major goals is to improve transparency and reproducibility of research and one of the ways we do this is through open peer review.

Talk about egg on face! Nature “the world’s best science” Magazine sets out to publish back-to-back papers on – of all topics – stem cell science.

From the files of J. K. Rowling. Publisher #1 Dear Ms. Rowling, Thank you for submitting your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We will be happy to consider it for publication. However we have some concerns about the excessive length of this manuscript. We usually handle works of 5-20 pages, sometimes as much as 30 pages. Your 1337-page manuscript exceeds these limits, and requires some trimming.

Regular readers will remember Jennifer Raff’s guest post on the PeerJ blog, How To Become Good At Peer-Review ; and my response to it, Three points of disagreement . Today I read a very different take on this piece by Chorasimilarity, who is a frequent commenter here at SV-POW!: Two pieces of all too obvious propaganda . Chorasimilarity starts by taking the original piece to task — fairly, I think — for

Jennifer Raff wrote a useful guest post on the PeerJ Blog: How To Become Good At Peer-Review. Most of its advice is excellent , and I’d heartily recommend it to anyone starting out on reviewing. But there are three points where I disagree with it. Here are the three things Jennifer said, and my counter-points.

An extraordinary study has come to light today, showing just how shoddy peer-review standards are at some journals. Evidently fascinated by Science ‘s eagerness to publish the fatally flawed Arsenic Life paper, John Bohannon conceived the idea of constructing a study so incredibly flawed that it didn’t even include a control.

Yesterday I announced that our new paper on Barosaurus was up as a PeerJ preprint and invited feedback. I woke up this morning to find its third substantial review waiting for me. That means that this paper has now accumulated as much useful feedback in the twenty-seven hours since I submitted it as any previous submission I’ve ever made.

I just got the nicest decline to review ever: That’s how you retire from science: you get to work like normal people. Awesome!