Do editors make a difference?

摘要

Who makes science? Researchers do, obviously, but other people help. The funding bodies and other organisations who provide financial support, and who invariably also dictate to some extent the agenda of what can be researched. The universities and other institutions who set the conditions under which researchers operate. And also the publishers of scientific journals and books, because it's not science until you tell someone about it. These days it's possible to disseminate your work simply by putting it on a website, avoiding the whole process of submitting a paper and having it reviewed, criticised and altered by various people. There is of course a practical motivation for most of us to work with the journals: we need to demonstrate the validity and quality of our work in order to establish our scientific credentials, important when it comes to getting a job, obtaining a promotion or competing for funding. But leaving these issues aside, we might ask: do the editors, reviewers and publishers actually help to make science better, or not?