End the wasteful tyranny of reviewer experiments

摘要

Submit a biomedical-research paper to Nature or other high-profile journals, and a common recommendation often comes back from referees: perform additional experiments. Although such extra work can provide important support for the results being presented, all too frequently it represents instead an entirely new phase of the project, or does not extend the reach of what is reported. It is often expensive and unnecessary, and slows the pace of research to a crawl. Among scientists in my field, there is growing concern that escalating demands by reviewers for the top journals, combined with the increasingly managerial role assigned to editors, now represents a serious flaw in the process of peer review.