We presented three common complaints about peer review at top-tier journals to editors at some of those journals. Here are their responses:
Complaint: Editors at commercial journals are young and inexperienced, relative to editors at nonprofit or society journals. As a result, commercial journal editors (such as those at Nature or Cell) often make errors in judgment when sorting through conflicting reviewers' reports, or choose reviewers with obvious conflicts of interest, causing worthy papers to be rejected, or unworthy papers to be accepted.
Responses: It's true that editors at commercial journals are almost always younger than editors at nonprofit or society journals, says Hemai Parthasarathy, managing editor at Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology. She was once a young editor at Nature and admits that she likely made mistakes in judgment then that she wouldn't make now. However, after 10 years of editing, she notes that editors of any age ...
