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Ann Thorac Surg 2004;77:10-11
© 2004 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons

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Editorial

A gift from anonymous

^a Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

^* Address reprint requests to Dr Edmunds, Annals of Thoracic Surgery, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, 3400 Spruce St, 5000 Ravdin Court, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
e-mail: hank.edmunds@uphs.upenn.edu

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Peer review is the process by which grants are awarded and scientific journal articles are published; it is a surrogate for quality control [1]. The process has many critics and not a few deficiencies. For journal articles, peer review is expensive, delays publication and is vulnerable to unfairness, censorship, bias, and conflicts of interest [1]. Peer review does not validate methodology, detect duplicate publication and cannot certify truthfulness and ethical compliance [2]. Selection of reviewers is unsystematic, secretive and subjective. The process may invite inexpert reviewers, the authors' competitors, conflicted persons and individuals who are unwilling or unable to critically evaluate the paper. To be fair, reviewers are rarely provided guidelines for critiquing a paper or writing a review; the process is "ad hoc" from start to finish. "Quality control" often amounts to advising the editor to publish or not; the author receives no useful feedback. Consensus is rare and the benefits of the process have never been convincingly validated [3]. Yet there is no practical alternative [1, 4].

In the last two decades attempts have been made to assess and improve the process [1, 5]. Blinding reviewers of authors, revealing (unmasking) reviewers to authors and checklists do not noticeably improve the quality of editorial peer review [2–4]. Peer review does improve the quality and readability of the manuscript [3] but fails to improve the quality of the reported research and to detect fraud, plagiarism, conflicts and duplicate publishing [3, 4, 6]. Consequently, editors, educators and scientists have recently looked to the internet for solutions. Physicists now solicit colleagues’ input prior to publication and during the past decade have established preprint, open review of submitted articles by the entire physics community through . . . [Full Text of this Article]