On June 5th, The Guardian published “The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?” It used The Lancet’s retraction of an article on negative effects of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment to illuminate the limitations and weaknesses of peer review in the best of times, and especially in a high stakes environment. Through the peer review process an expert(s) reads a manuscript to remove anomalous data and improve analysis, but they do not reproduce experiments or check underlying data (and the data is not necessarily produced). Furthermore, peer review as service is not adequately acknowledged or rewarded. Researchers are incentivized to do research, not review others’ works. Poorly reviewed science, or research not reviewed at all, undermines community trust and scientific impact.
Month: June 2020
New systems for peer review amongst COVID-19 limitations
The OASPA webinar “Scholarly Communication & COVID-19: Closing the Loop on Peer Review” presented alternatives to individual publisher controlled peer review and data storage systems. The #C19RapidReviewInitiative was a response by 9 publishers to fast track COVID-19 research publications, then it became a forum, joined by 3 additional publishers, to develop new systems for sharing peer reviews and data sources more broadly. One mechanism is the Rapid PREReview platform, Outbreak Science, which brings together reviewers, a shared code of conduct and a pre-review template linked to preprints and data from many sources. The goal was to design a transparent and equitable system of scholarly review through which an author would submit a paper once, and if rejected by one publisher, the reviews would continue to be available with submissions to subsequent publishers. The #C19RapidReviewInitiative group has coalesced around enforcing rather than encouraging provision of research data as a requirement. Fairsharing.org is working with researchers and organizations to ensure that data metadata is standardized and interoperable. While these organizations have come together to facilitate quality COVID-19 research distribution, their work has wider implications for collaborative open science.