The reluctance of many citizens to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 is just one symptom of a loss of trust in information and its sources. Even within the scientific community, the reliability of sources and data is a difficult question to answer. From the proliferation of predatory journals to the production of fake data, from P-hacking to the manipulation of statistical tests, it is becoming difficult to “know which saint to trust” especially when the major journals show themselves powerless against such scams (cf. retracted article during COVID-19 pandemic: Mehra et al., The Lancet 2020).
Free access to raw data and scripts is an avenue to be considered: it would encourage authors to transmit the clearest and most exhaustive methodology and would give readers a guarantee of confidence that would go beyond the very random anonymous peer-reviewing. Transparent reviewing, requiring time and skills, could then no longer be voluntary. Could we imagine that publishers themselves have a department dedicated to “guaranteeing reproducibility”? The reviewer could then concentrate on his core competence, which is to interpret results that he considers reliable.
We can no longer ignore the fact that scientific reality is so complex that an expert himself has a biased view of his own specialty. So let's not expect reviewers to be able to make value judgments on methodological, statistical, medical or even ethical, historical and philosophical grounds! To admit the complexity of science is first of all to accept to put oneself in a position of humility, and to admit that each scientist is himself blind to his blind spots, his identity, his research path and his ambitions. The current anonymous and opaque peer-reviewing system is not satisfactory. Although some stakeholders and decision-makers promote a culture of research integrity and therefore a moderation of the number of publications, the number of submissions only increases every year and editors cannot guarantee the perfect integrity of the articles they publish if peer-reviewing is not revisited. In this context, at a time of democratization of Open Access Science, I believe that publishers have a crucial role to play in the credibility of published data.
We invite all authors involved in Research on Research to participate in this discussion for which our journal provides a forum.
Disclosure of interest
The author declares that he has no competing interest.