The peer review process is in need of in-depth review

At the core of scientific publishing is peer review. During this process, scientific literature is scrutinized, and errors or horrors are addressed. As mentioned in a Vox.com article: Why you can't always believe what you read in scientific journals, this process serves as a cleaning machine that gets rid of all “junk” data and polishes scientific literature. However, this process is far from perfect, as exemplified by the number of retractions of articles published.

Steen RG, Casadevall A, Fang FC (2013). Why Has the Number of Scientific Retractions Increased?. PLOS ONE 8(7)

To address this issue, a group of scientist founded PubPeer, described as an “online journal club” that allows the scientific community to openly and anonymously review literature. The founders of this website argue that an important reason for the mistakes overlooked is the centralized nature of the peer review process. In the traditional peer review process, a selected few experts are allowed to review a manuscript before publishing. This process, rely on the capacity of the few reviewers to identify and notify mistakes on the manuscripts. This website opens the peer review responsibility to thousands of experts.

Even when this alternative seems far from perfect, it is definitely a step in the right direction. Opening the review process to the scientific community, and making this process more decentralized and transparent, will continue foster the ultimate goal of improving the quality of research articles published. In the end, all literature should be objectively reviewed. As Carl Sagan said: “the hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away.”