Peer review
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Nell’ambito della comunicazione scientifica la selezione degli articoli degni pubblicazione avviene tramite peer review, cioè la valutazione di specialisti. Gli editori e le agenzie di finanziamento usano il peer review per selezionare le proposte ricevute. Questo processo inoltre costringe gli autori a adeguarsi agli standard della loro disciplina. Pubblicazioni e premi che non abbiano subito un peer review sono generalmente guardate con sospetto dai ricercatori e dai professionisti di molte discipline. Il peer review è nato assieme ai periodici scientifici e non è privo di difetti e di progetti di perfezionamento.
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Ragioni per il peer review
La ragione principale del peer review è che è molto difficile per un autore individuale o per un gruppo di ricerca poter individuare tutti gli errori o i difetti di uno studio complesso. Questo non perché le inesattezze siano aghi nel pagliaio, ma perché in un prodotto intellettuale nuovo e talvolta eclettico, un'opportunità di miglioramento può essere visibile soltanto a persone con conoscenze molto specifiche. Di conseguenza mostrare il proprio lavoro ad altri aumenta la probabilità che le debolezze vengano identificate e, grazie a consigli e incoraggiamenti, corrette. L'anonimato e l'indipendenza dei revisori hanno lo scopo di incoraggiare critiche aperte e scoraggiare la parzialità nelle decisioni sul finanziamento e la pubblicazione.
Come funziona
Peer review subjects an author's work or ideas to the scrutiny of one or more others who are experts in the field. These referees each return an evaluation of the work, including suggestions for improvement, to an editor or other intermediary (typically, most of the referees' comments are eventually seen by the author as well). Evaluations usually include an explicit recommendation of what to do with the manuscript or proposal, often chosen from a menu provided by the journal or funding agency. Most recommendations are along the lines of the following:
- to unconditionally accept the manuscript or proposal,
- to accept it in the event that its authors improve it in certain ways,
- to reject it, but encourage revision and invite resubmission
- to reject it outright.
During this process, the role of the referees is advisory, and the editor is under no formal obligation to accept the opinions of the referees. Furthermore, in scientific publication, the referees do not act as a group, do not communicate with each other, and typically are not aware of each other's identities. There is usually no requirement that the referees achieve consensus. Thus the group dynamics is substantially different from that of a jury. In situations where the referees disagree about the quality of a work, there are a number of strategies for reaching a decision.
Traditionally reviewers would remain anonymous to the authors, but this is slowly changing. In some academic fields most journals now offer the reviewer the option of remaining anonymous or not; papers sometimes contain, in the acknowledgments section, thanks to (named) referees who helped improve the paper.
At a journal or book publisher, the task of picking reviewers typically falls to an editor. When a manuscript arrives, an editor solicits reviews from scholars or other experts who may or may not have already expressed a willingness to referee for that journal or book division. Granting agencies typically recruit a panel or committee of reviewers in advance of the arrival of applications.
In some disciplines, such as computer science, there exist refereed venues (such as conferences and workshops). To be admitted to speak, scientists must submit a scientific paper (generally short, often 15 pages or less) in advance. This paper is reviewed by a "program committee" (the equivalent of an editorial board), who generally requests inputs from referees. The hard deadlines set by the conferences tend to limit the options to either accept or reject the paper.
Typically referees are not selected from among the authors' close colleagues, relatives, or friends. Referees are supposed to inform the editor of any conflict of interests that might arise. Journals or individual editors often invite a manuscript's authors to name people whom they consider qualified to referee their work. Authors are sometimes also invited to name natural candidates who should be disqualified, in which case they may be asked to provide justification (typically expressed in terms of conflict of interest).
Editors solicit author input in selecting referees because academic writing typically is very specialized. Editors often oversee many specialties, and may not be experts in any of them, since editors may be full time professionals with no time for scholarship. But after an editor selects referees from the pool of candidates, the editor typically is obliged not to disclose the referees' identities to the authors, and in scientific journals, to each other. Policies on such matters differ between academic disciplines.
Scientific journals observe this convention universally. The two or three chosen referees report their evaluation of the article and suggestions for improvement to the editor. The editor then relays the bulk of these comments to the author (some comments may be designated as confidential to the editor), meanwhile basing on them his or her decision whether to publish the manuscript. When an editor receives very positive and very negative reviews for the same manuscript, the editor often will solicit one or more additional reviews as a tie-breaker.
As another strategy in the case of ties, editors may invite authors to reply to a referee's criticisms and permit a compelling rebuttal to break the tie. If an editor does not feel confident to weigh the persuasiveness of a rebuttal, the editor may solicit a response from the referee who made the original criticism. In rare instances, an editor will convey communications back and forth between authors and a referee, in effect allowing them to debate a point. Even in these cases, however, editors do not allow referees to confer with each other, and the goal of the process is explicitly not to reach consensus or to convince anyone to change their opinions. Some medical journals, however, (usually following the open access model) have begun posting on the Internet the pre-publication history of each individual article, from the original submission to reviewers' reports, authors' comments, and revised manuscripts.
After reviewing and resolving any potential ties, there may be one of three possible outcomes for the article. The two simplest are outright rejection and unconditional acceptance. In most cases, the authors may be given a chance to revise, with or without specific recommendations or requirements from the reviewers.
La nomina dei revisori
Recruiting referees is a political art, because referees are not paid, and reviewing takes time away from the referee's main activities, such as his or her own research. To the would-be recruiter's advantage, most potential referees are authors themselves, or at least readers, who know that the publication system requires that experts donate their time. Editors are at an especial advantage in recruiting a scholar when they have overseen the publication of his or her work, or if the scholar is one who hopes to submit manuscripts to that editor's publication in the future. Granting agencies, similarly, tend to seek referees among their present or former grantees. Serving as a referee can even be a condition of a grant, or professional association membership.
Another difficulty that peer-review organizers face is that, with respect to some manuscripts or proposals, there may be few scholars who truly qualify as experts. Such a circumstance often frustrates the goals of reviewer anonymity and the avoidance of conflicts of interest. It also increases the chances that an organizer will not be able to recruit true experts – people who have themselves done work like that under review, and who can read between the lines. Low-prestige journals and granting agencies that award little money are especially handicapped with regard to recruiting experts.
Finally, anonymity adds to the difficulty in finding reviewers in another way. In scientific circles, credit and reputation are important, and while being a referee for a prestigious journal is considered an honor, the anonymity restrictions make it impossible to publicly state that one was a referee for a particular article. However, credit and reputation are principally established by publications, not by refereeing; and in some fields refereeing may not be anonymous.
Stili di revisione
Peer review can be rigorous, in terms of the skill brought to bear, without being highly stringent. An agency may be flush with money to give away, for example, or a journal may have few impressive manuscripts to choose from, so there may be no use to being picky. Conversely, when either funds or publication space is limited, peer review may be used to select an extremely small number of proposals or manuscripts.
Often the decision of what counts as "good enough" falls entirely to the editor or organizer of the review. In other cases, referees will each be asked to make the call, with only general guidance from the coordinator on what stringency to apply.
Some journals such as Science and Nature have extremely stringent standards for publication, and will reject papers which are of good quality scientific work that they feel are not breakthroughs in the field. Others such as Physical Review and the Astrophysical Journal use peer review primarily to filter out obvious mistakes and incompetence. Different publication rates reflect these different criteria: Nature publishes about 5 percent of received papers, while Astrophysical Journal publishes about 70 percent. The different publication rates are also reflected in the size of the journals.
Screening by peers may be more or less laissez-faire depending on the discipline. Physicists, for example, tend to think that decisions about the worthiness of an article are best left to the marketplace. Yet even within such a culture peer review serves to ensure high standards in what is published. Outright errors are detected and authors receive both edits and suggestions.
To preserve the integrity of the peer-review process, submitting authors are not informed of who reviews their papers; sometimes, they might not even know the identity of the associate editor who is responsible for the paper. In many cases, alternatively called "blind" or "double-blind" review, the identity of the authors is concealed from the reviewers, lest the knowledge of authorship bias their review; in such cases, however, the associate editor responsible for the paper does know who the author is. Sometimes the scenario where the reviewers do know who the authors are is called "single-blind" to distinguish it from the "double-blind" process. In double-blind review, the authors are required to remove any reference that may point to them as the authors of the paper.
While the anonymity of reviewers is almost universally preserved, double-blind review (where authors are also anonymous to reviewers) is not always employed. Critics of the double-blind process point out that, despite the extra editorial effort to ensure anonymity, the process often fails to do so, since certain approaches, methods, notations, etc., may point to a certain group of people in a research stream, and even to a particular person. Proponents of the single-blind process argue that if the reviewers of a paper are unknown to each other, the associate editor responsible for the paper can easily verify the objectivity of the reviews. Double-blind review is thus strongly dependent upon the goodwill of the participants.
Tempi di revisione
La peer review è un processo lento. Uno studio specialistico deve essere valutato da specialisti; il compito dell’editor di selezionare il target di revisori da un ampio database può richiedere diverse settimane di tempo, in modo da ridurre i rischi di rifiuto per motivi di impegno o divergenza di competenze. La velocità di valutazione è importante per gli autori. Un metodo provato per velocizzare il processo sarebbe quello di pagare i revisori, ma è poco utilizzato perché si teme una diminuzione di oggettività nelle recensioni. Solitamente i periodici si limitano a pubblicare una lista dei collaboratori e i ringraziamenti.
Questione del costo
Un altro problema della peer review è il costo. I revisori non vengano pagati, ma è la selezione il momento che incide di più sul costo della pubblicazione: include gli stipendi degli editors e degli assistenti di redazione, il prezzo dei software per l’archiviazione e la gestione delle reviews e degli strumenti di comunicazione (fax, posta, telefono).
Questione dell'attendibilità
Infine, la questione più scottante: quanto è attendibile la peer review? Questo sistema si fonda sull’integrità della comunità scientifica. Ma la soggettività dei recensori non è eliminabile. Questi vengono influenzati positivamente e negativamente da diversi fattori estranei alla qualità del materiale da esaminare, come prova uno studio del Journal of the American Medical Association. La discriminazione nella peer-review esiste nella sopravvalutazione di autori noti o “protetti” da istituzioni prestigiose, ma anche nelle differenze geografiche o di sesso, oppure può essere causata da un conflitto d’interessi.
Iniziative e progetti di controllo
Gli abusi nella peer review sono tanti e tanto rilevanti che nel 1999 è stata fondato da un gruppo di editors il COPE (Commitee on Publication Ethics). L’iniziativa ha ora carattere di istituzione ufficiale e segnala ai suoi associati i casi di cattiva condotta. Questa non è legata solo alle discriminazioni, ma anche e soprattutto al pericolo di plagio: in quattro anni il COPE ha segnalato settanta casi di pubblicazioni simili. Uno studio del British Medical Journal ha mostrato che la peer-review è un sistema scadente nella segnalazione di errori o plagi. Un metodo molto sostenuto dal gruppo BJM per diminuire gli abusi nella peer-review è di eliminare l’anonimato dei recensori: l’“apertura” del processo dovrebbe anche portare credito ai recensori ed è fortemente richiesta dagli autori. Questo metodo può essere criticato perché può portare troppa “diplomazia” nelle recensioni, cioè eliminarne la forza critica. È sperabile che una standardizzazione delle procedure e la conseguente istruzione dei recensori possa portare una minore soggettività. Per quanto riguarda la cattiva condotta, sono state create altre associazioni con gli stessi fini del COPE, come lo US Office of Research Integrity, la WAME (World Association of Medical Editors) e il Danish Council on Scientific Dishonesty. Queste organizzazioni credono nel ruolo dell’educazione e a questo scopo diffondono linee di guida, applicando sanzioni solo come ultima risorsa.
Peer review e Information technology
Con l’avvento di Internet, il mercato ha lanciato sul web vari sistemi per la peer review, ad accesso limitato per autori, revisori e redattori, con costi diversi e diversi livelli di funzionalità. Questi sistemi permettono all’autore di effettuare un upload dell’articolo che, convertito in formato PDF, è immediatamente reperibile dall’editor e dai revisori. Le spese postali sono eliminate e tutto il processo diventa molto più veloce. Col sistema on line diventa necessario assumere nello staff redazionale persone che gestiscano l’aumento di invio degli articoli e assistano gli autori e i revisori che non sanno utilizzare correttamente il sistema.