Before a scientific article is published, it must pass through the hands of specialists responsible for evaluating its rigor. This process, called peer review, has been considered the main safeguard of scientific quality for decades.
However, it is increasingly contested.
Indeed, scholarly journals are struggling to recruit specialized evaluators – in increasingly specialized areas of research – and the reports they produce are of variable quality and submitted within stretching deadlines.
These are the consequences of a structural imbalance: researchers are subject to strong pressure to publish and evaluate the work of their peers is a time-consuming task which brings them much less recognition than the publication of their own work.
“Peer review can also be a mechanism for controlling and defining what is considered “truly scientific”,” says Lucía Cespedes, research advisor at Érudit at the University of Montreal and co-author of the paper.Report on the open evaluation,recently published by the Quebec Research and Sharing Network for Scientific Journals (Réseau Circé).
And behind the anonymity of the evaluators, which is presented as a guarantee of impartiality, there are biases that no one can question. The dominant model – double-blind review, where neither the author nor the reviewer knows the identity of the other – only became the norm in the 1970s.
Several decades later, its limits are well established and a movement for open evaluation is gaining momentum in scholarly circles in order to increase transparency, collaboration and shared responsibility within a currently rather opaque process.