As we are in academia field, often that we hear the term Peer Review when it related to publish a scientific manuscript, in a journal, or a book section. However, this process happened more common in academia, for example: tenure track, if you are on tenure track, your research outputs, education teaching and other activities will be evaluated by a group of senior peers. Another example will be funding/grant proposal evaluation. During the grant proposal application, the documents will then be submitted to research council for peer review, this process ensures scientific credibility and ethical standards of research proposals. 

To conclude, Peer review is the evaluation process of work or outputs by one or more qualified members within the relevant/similar field of the work producer. It is of vital important for maintaining the quality standards, improve performance, and provide credibility of the work.

When it comes to scientific publication, we can imagine that Peer review process has been placed similar expectation as it in other fields: an effective and efficient way for maintaining the integrity of science. By definition, Peer review is designed to assess the validity, quality and often the originality of articles for publication. Its ultimate purpose is to maintain the integrity of science by filtering out invalid or poor-quality articles (Willey Publisher). Journals are relying on scholarly peer review to help editors assess the quality of articles submitted to their journals. Articles from scholars will be revised by other peers, and in return, scholars should also review articles by our academic peers. This is our "payback". 

Although Peer review is the cornerstone of scholarly publishing. When using Google Ngram, an analysis tool that tracks the frequency of words and phrases in books over time, for searching the term “Peer Review”, it appears that 'Peer review' has not been in common usage for an extensive period until 1950s. This is an intriguing observation as this trend also serves as a fascinating reflection of the how society’s perceptions of science have shifted and developed throughout history.

In 1665, there were two publications were released by UK and FR, respectively, in almost identical timeframes. The explicitly purpose of these 2 publications, was to disseminate what goes on in the republic of letters (which was an long distance intellectual community in 17-18 in EU and US) to its own people, i.e. New books printed in EU, obituaries of famous people, experiment in Chemistry and Physics and etc. After years of running the journals, in 1800-1900, transaction has changed its remits focusing on publish original research papers; in this period, publishing report in transaction has become an honor, and thus, receives load amount of "submission". To protect its honor and improve the screening procedure, Royal Society of Edinburgh adopted a collective review process for material to be published. The paper will first go through the communicator of transaction and thus a committee meeting. If they all agree the interest, they will read through the paper, and decide if the paper can be finally published.  This whole process thus has become the rudiment of today's peer review process. 

For a very long history, science has been a privilege of wealthy rich white man. However, the narrative of scientific progress underwent a seismic shift in 1942 when a US scientist was appointed as the coordinator of a groundbreaking project in New Mexico, USA. Tasked with developing a weapon capable of ending World War II, this project, known as the Manhattan Project, and the coordinator of the project, is J. Robert Oppenheimer. The appear of nuclear weaponry brought about the conclusion of the war and forever altered the trajectory of global conflict. The Manhattan Project served as a catalyst, prompting governments worldwide to recognize the transformative power of scientific innovation. Governments emerged as primary patrons of scientific research, channeling significant funding into scientific endeavors. This marked the beginning of a new era, with science taking center stage during the Cold War period of space war. As scientific discoveries snowballed, the need for rigorous evaluation became predominant. Thus, the concept of peer review emerged as a quality control mechanism to distinguish scholarly scientific knowledge from News, gossip, opinions, and self-published material

This is how Peer Review process look like today. Researchers conducted experiment, then draft their research findings into a scientific report or manuscripts. The manuscripts were written with  an audience of other researchers in mind. Finally the researchers submit their manuscript to the journals for publish. In order to be published, the manuscript needs to pass several quality checks.

As we have continuously emphasize the vital importance of peer review in advancing science. One might assume that it garners universal approval and appreciation. Yet, there are two reports offered by Clarivate and Elsevier, two prominent entities of scientific communities. According to the survey from Clarivate, 98% percent of the researchers think Peer Review is important. The survey from Scopus showed that researchers expressed the process has improved the quality/determining the originality, detecting fraud and etc. However, like all established systems, the peer review system has its critics.  

An ideal revision letter from the reviewers should be constructive and thorough, with the aim to help authors to improve the quality of the paper, however, its not always the case.

If you type Peer review in google search, the associate term often related to "Not scientific", fake or broken. This reflects a widespread perception of dissatisfaction with the peer review process. There are some examples of reviewer’ comments: 

The comments are really harsh and lack of professionalism. Look at this case I came across, it take the author 7 years to get his paper published. And it is about Ebola, I mean come on, 7 years, the Ebola can shuffle the world all around. In addition, last weekend, several AI cases went viral on the internet, which bring the necessary of Peer Review in Scientific publication to the eye of the storm. Such mistakes were slipping past peer review and proofreading. The increasing unprofessional evidence contributed to a growing skepticism surrounding the efficacy, integrity, and promptness of Peer review.

Why do you think these comments are made unpolite? Will you comment such thing on a paper? What if your name is showed here? Although there is transformation in the Peer Review process, however, majority of the peer review were done anonymously. This lead to my next topic, the forms of Peer review. Most/majority of today's peer review are done anonymously. Lets look how peer review is done, maybe this can offer you an idea.

Currently, there are mainly 3 types of peer review. I will break them down in the following slides. Single-blind review means that reviewers know who the authors are and not verse versa. This type of peer review has its advantage, which is the review can be totally honest about their opinions. However, it has a lot of downsides. Can you tell me some drawbacks that you can imagine. First, it is not transparent. Single blind review has been criticized for allowing all kinds of bias and other kinds of irresponsibility on the part of reviewers to flourish behind the veil of secrecy.

One response to the problems of reviewer's bias has been to move to double-blind. In this case, reviewers and authors don't reveal to each other. Pros: it is argued, they will focus on the content of the manuscript itself, unaffected by conscious or unconscious biases. Cons: However, from a pragmatic viewpoint, it is very difficult to disguise the identity of the author of an academic manuscript from a skilled reviewer; by definition the reviewer is an expert in the field who will frequently know the previous work of authors in the field. Once the reviewers know about the identity of authors, the previous cons of single blind review remains show.

To sum up, the anonymous peer review are very likely to introduce bias. And there is also a strong ethical argument against secrecy, namely that it is seen to be unfair for somebody making an important judgement on the work of others to do so in secret. 

As PhD/researchers are obligated to submit their work to journals, and up-to-date, majority of the journals still apply the single blind review. A negative experiences of submission can lead to some uncertainty and harms to the authors in case there is an emergency to publish a paper. According to current blind review procedure. A submit paper will be like on a piece of meat lying on chopping block. However, there's some good news: there are online tools available to assist with the peer review process. One such platform is SCIREV, a website created by researchers for researchers. SCIREV offers researchers the opportunity to share their experiences with the review process, aiming to make it more transparent. It's important to note that SCIREV is a non-profit organization. By sharing your own experiences on SCIREV, you not only contribute to the community but also gain insights from others' experiences. While journals may provide some information about their review processes, it's often not as comprehensive or transparent as what you'll find on SCIREV.

Third form of publication called Open Peer review. Open Peer Review. Depends on the level of openness, this can be divided into 3 levels. Open identity means your name will be visible and part of the record. Open disclosure peer review, not only your name, but your comments will also be available. And the last one, is open invitation review. This means anyone can contribute to the peer review process. Before I show you an example of how Open Peer review works, there is a type of publication that you should know as it is emerging more and more in the field: Preprint.

A preprint is a completed author manuscript stored on a preprint server that has not undergone peer review yet. Since 1991, physicists and mathematicians have been using the arXiv preprint repository. About why and when should I submit preprint, we will address in another course scientific publishing. 

An example of Open Peer Review: HESS is an EGU journal, after submitting your paper to the journal, it will stay with editor for checking whether it meets a basic scientific quality and if it contributes something new to the field of hydrology. They can suggest technical corrections (typing errors, clarification of figures, etc.) before posting the manuscript as a preprint. Then it will back the author, after acceptance of the manuscript for public peer review and discussion, it appears as a preprint and is citable with a digital object identifier (DOI). In this period, the paper receives both short comments from community and also long comments from nominated referees during the 8 weeks open discussion period. Then the author should address all the review comments. Send it back to the editor for the further published process. PLOS one is also option to publish the review since 2019. and now, more and more journals offering the Open Peer Review. 

There are journals have their own preprint server, or PLOS one, but there for some preprint submitted to server, it is also possible for these papers receive peer review and can be cited as peer-reviewed articles. After publishing your paper in a preprint server, you can request a peer review process in peercommunityin.

Same as the other 2 review forms, it has pros and cons. It makes the review process more transparent and avoid the hostile comment. In addition, the review report itself can also be a scientific output, to a certain level, increase the exposure of the researcher. However, it also has cons as you can imagine, a young researchers maybe hesitate to reveal his/her really opinion to an article that published by senior researchers. Allows quarrelsome or vindictive peers comments; opportunities of nepotism as prominent authors receive preferential treatment; Reciprocate favours over time; limit the candidates pool and lead to more bland, timid reviews.

Peer review doesn’t only happen before a manuscript being published, but after. If you read an already published paper and found, hey, this seems suspicious. Can you still comment on it. The answer is yes, on the website of PubPeer, you can post your comments and the start a conversation with the authors. By downloading the extension of PubPeer, you can also see if the paper you want to read have received certain doubt. This provides transparency to the scientific community, encourage recommender and reviewers to make high quality evaluations. 

Before accept an invitation for peer review, there are several points you should be aware: