Letters

Your recent article on peer review1 omitted the fact that far too many journals do not report back to their reviewers. Only if a reviewer gets the decision letter plus the other reviews will he be able to learn and improve. Learning about the decision only when the paper makes it - or doesn't - to Medline is not sufficient.

Manfred Gessler
Theodor Boveri Institute for Life Sciences
Wuerzburg, Germany
gessler@biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de

Your article1 and editorial2 on peer review make it clear that it is probably inevitable that the young, nonworking scientists who edit certain journals will find themselves unable to deal appropriately with a wide range of complex scientific topics, with famous and sometimes overbearing authors, and with equally famous and sometimes unethical reviewers.

Scientists themselves must shoulder some of the blame, however. It is a double embarrassment to modern science, especially biological-biomedical science, that the community has allowed itself to be ...