Are negative reviews, predatory reviewers or failed peer review rewarded at Publons?
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Are negative reviews, predatory reviewers or failed peer review rewarded at Publons? Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva 1 Received: 23 April 2020 / Revised: 23 April 2020 / Accepted: 27 April 2020 # SICOT aisbl 2020
Keywords Confidentiality . Ethics . Peer reviewer . Predatory peers . Quality control . Transparency . Trust
Dear International Orthopaedics Editors, At Publons,1 which is owned by Clarivate™ Analytics, peer reviewers gain credit for having conducted peer review, i.e. a peer reviewer’s “quality” is measured by their quantity of peer reports. However, there is a risk that the reviews themselves are not treated as transparent pieces of evidence in the open science movement, but rather as commodities in a publishing landscape that seeks instead to quantify contribution and output [6]. The intrinsic risk of commodifying peer reviews is that quantity, rather than the quality, of peer review, is rewarded [1]. A search at Publons, for example, of Highly Cited Researchers2 reveals academics with an impressive publishing profile and also rewarded peer reviews, labelled as “verified reviews”, which sometimes number in the hundreds or even thousands. Any attempt to access those peer review reports is impossible—except for open peer reports— because the peer review remains confidential, i.e. the content of peer reports remains closed to the public. Therefore, there is no way to independently verify the quality of the peer review, or to independently assess its content or substance. Despite this, Mavrogenis et al. [3] advocate for the use of Publons’ statistics as the basis for other quantitative rewards schemes, such as the “the international orthopaedics reviewers score (INOR-RS)”, claiming that “[t]he quality of the reviewers, therefore, determines the quality of the peer-review”. Why is the ability to independently verify the content and quality of a peer reviewer report so important? Peer review 1
https://publons.com/about/home/ (last accessed: April 23, 2020).
continues to serve as academic publishing’s fail-safe mechanism of quality control. Yet, increasing retractions and discovery of flaws during post-publication peer review suggest that peer review is itself flawed, indicating that either editorial decisions or peer reports of retracted papers were themselves flawed. If peer review was flawed, if errors or fraud were not detected by the quality gate-keepers (peer reviewers and editors), then why should peer reviewers who oversaw the peer review of those flawed papers be rewarded at Publons? Should predatory peers, who may have stolen intellectual content from other academics, or who review for “predatory” journals of poor academic quality [5], be rewarded at Publons, and how can one differentiate the wheat from the chaff at Publons [2]? Based on the advice, opinion or judgement of a peer reviewer, a paper is either accepted or rejected, and editors weigh in on peers’ opinions to make final accept/ reject decisions. Therefore, in order to judge the fairness and validity of a peer review re
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