ISTOCK, TEMMUZCANHave you read a paper and thought: “How could peer reviews support the publication of such a paper?” I have. More than once. Other times, I have read fascinating papers outside of my field and wondered what the concerns of the experts who peer reviewed the study were. What important caveats am I missing?
Sometimes, I am lucky and find the answers to such questions: A few publications, including those from EMBO Press and eLife, publish the peer reviews alongside the papers. Reading such peer reviews has provided an additional dimension of appreciating and understanding the experiments and the findings, especially when I am not very familiar with the topic. But for most other journals I cannot access the peer reviews that supported a paper’s publication because most journals hide them.
The exit from this very sorry state is for journals to publish the anonymized peer reviews.
Scientific rigor demands that claims be substantiated by evidence. If I claim that gene A regulates gene B and provide no evidence, my claim will be dismissed. It must be dismissed. Yet, ...
