Despite the flagrant trolling of its title, Nature ’s recent opinion-piece Open access is tiring out peer reviewers is mostly pretty good. But the implication that the rise of open-access journals has increased the aggregate burden of peer-review is flatly wrong, so I felt obliged to leave a comment explaining why. Here is that comment, promoted to a post of its own (with minor edits for clarity):

In a comment on the last post, Mark Robinson asked an important question: As so often in these discussions, it depends what we mean by our terms. The Barosaurus paper, like this one on neck cartilage, is “published” in the sense that it’s been released to the public, and has a stable home at a well known location maintained by a reputable journal. It’s open for public comment, and can be cited in other publications.

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.