Behind the Curtain Again

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some of the not so great behind the scenes goings on in science. I'm revisiting that after news broke yesterday of a paper by Dr Fiona Ingleby and Dr Megan Head being rejected by a journal reviewer with the following comment.

Images of comments from Fiona Ingleby's twitter

The paper in question was on gender issues in the flow of researchers from PhDs to Post Docs and not only does the review suggest that the authors needed 'to find one or two male biologists to work with', it also included this lovely commentary.

Images of comments from Fiona Ingleby's twitter

Or Mr Reviewer, maybe there are issues of where women get published due to people like you. On top of the drivel above the Reviewer also acknowledges looking up the author's websites and notes their genders and post doc status in the review and appears to see them as 'junior' researchers. Ironically both authors  have over 20 years of research under their belts. You know how I said status matters in my original behind the curtain post? Well, I think this is a perfect example of that point. 

On their twitter feeds, Dr Ingleby and Dr Head have pointed out that this kind of review really shows why we need double blind peer review. At the moment, when an author submits a paper they get reviews back from anonymous reviewers. However, the reviewers get full access to the author's details so can easily find out things like their gender and status in the field in question at will. Does this skew their perceptions of the work they are given to read? Well I think the above comments tell you that it does. Double bind peer review would remove the element of reviewer bias as the reviewer can only judge the work, not the person. Another option is to let the authors know who is reviewing them because, as you find with internet trolls, once you take away the mask of anonymity, people think a lot more before they speak. However, a clear argument against this would be that knowing a reviewer's identity could lead to personal vendettas or bribery. Therefore, double blind peer review is probably the way to go to protect integrity in science. 

The publisher (PLOS One for anyone who cares) who allowed these comments to stand as 'legitimate' criticism have since apologised and state that the paper is under being looked at under the appeal Dr Ingleby and Dr Head have submitted. But frankly, that's not good enough. How could any editor allow such complete and utter rubbish be included as a review? What are they going to do to ensure this doesn't happen again? Will they stop sending papers to the reviewer in question? I hope that this incident sparks a wider discussion and maybe change in the peer review process, but I won't hold my breath. If at least it makes reviewers think twice about what they write about papers and what editors accept as legitimate reviews then that's a small positive result from this. However. until peer review changes, I don't think we'll see the back of dodgy reviewers comments.