What More Can We Do in Peer Review to Achieve Equity in Scientific Publication?

Dear Editor,

I have read with great interest the Editorial entitled “Equity in Scientific Publication.”¹ I highly applaud Dr. Juliet Nabyonga-Orem for the deep insight and attention to the equity of scientific publication. I also noticed that, as the new editor-in-chief of Health Services Insights, Dr. Juliet Nabyonga-Orem has made a lot of effective measures to the journal in order to achieve the equity of scientific publication. Such as modifying the scope of the journal, expanding the editorial board, full article processing charge waivers granted to researchers from low-income countries, offering several article types, and a quick turnaround on submitted manuscripts. Obviously, these initiatives will help researchers from all over the world share their valuable research results more equitably, regardless of their economic level. In addition to these aspects, I believe that as a key component of scientific publication, peer review also has a huge impact on fairness. Therefore, the purpose of my letter is to share some of the problems with the current peer review process and to provide some suggestions.

Peer review is regarded as the “gold standard” of scientific publication. However, a worrying phenomenon is that as the number of manuscripts submitted for publication increases exponentially, it becomes increasingly difficult for editors to find qualified reviewers.² Therefore, most peer reviews are actually conducted by amateur reviewers, resulting in great differences in the quality of peer reviews.³ Specifically, some reviewers do not evaluate the quality of the manuscript based on the author’s research purpose, but add a lot of subjective colors to imagine how a study should be done or what content should be included, and often give a very negative evaluation of the manuscript based on these assumptions.

However, when referring to the comments of reviewers to make decisions on whether the manuscript can be published, editors lack the necessary professional judgment and sense of responsibility.⁴ If editors receive a negative evaluation from a reviewer, they are more likely to make a decision that the manuscript can’t be published,⁵ but rarely seriously evaluates whether the negative comments of the reviewer are reasonable.

Obviously, in some cases, this practice is irresponsible and unfair to the author. Maybe we can make efforts in the following 3 aspects.

First, publishers should establish a review record of reviewers, record in detail the performance of each reviewer in each review, and pay special attention to the rationality of the reviewers who often give negative comments. Reviewers who obviously violate the original intention of peer review should be blacklisted. Even though this will make it more difficult for many journals and editors to find reviewers, but in order to maintain the science, rigor and fairness of academic publishing, it is worth.

Second, for editors, they can’t make decisions directly and quickly when seeing negative opinions. They should evaluate from a professional perspective, or seek the opinions of additional reviewers, or give the author an opportunity to explain.

Finally, given that it is more difficult to give a positive evaluation than a negative evaluation, if a manuscript gets more comments on accept (even if there is only 1 reviewer, but the recommendation is to accept, provided that the reason is sufficient and reasonable), the article should be published. In order to avoid the error of publishing inappropriate articles, such type of articles should be specially marked when published with the consent of the author, and accept the post publication review by reviewers with professional backgrounds related to the research topics. If there are reasonable negative opinions from more reviewers, follow-up operations can be carried out.