Openly Streamlining Peer Review

We are delighted to host our first guest post on Biologue  by James Rosindell and William D. Pearse  from Silwood Park, Imperial College London. They share their view on how we might improve peer review.

Elsevier recently announced a peer review challenge. Open to all, the competition invites contestants to submit a 600-word idea of how to improve the peer review system. Winning entries are soon to be announced on Elsevier’s website. Unfortunately, the terms and conditions of entry involve making your idea the property of Elsevier, so we fear that even those who don’t win will no longer have the right to implement their idea or make it public. Since having our idea known is more important to us than winning a prize we decided to make our entry publically available here rather than enter the challenge. In this way, we hope that our ideas will contribute to the debate on this subject and to the implementation of some of our suggestions.