THE ROLE OF PEER REVIEW, AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW, RESPONSE
Robert Parker
Linkoping University

Perhaps chemistry is less contentious and results less open to multiple interpretation than other disciplines.  Certainly the vast majority of decisions as to acceptance or rejection are very straightforward for chemistry articles using traditional peer review.  The traditional method meets our current needs: it is fast (and getting faster with the elimination of postal delays by using electronic communication) and, we believe, reliable.

I agree that there is a significant area there. More or less subjective considerations, such as "how interesting is this result" plays a strong role in our area. There is a fine line between reviews and discussions *about* the thesis made in the article.

Finally, with electronic versions of journals it is very easy to append additional files to the electronic equivalent of the printed journal (electronic supplementary information etc.). This provides the opportunity of including comments from the open community received post-acceptance. Perhaps this is a half-way house to the dual peer review proposed by Erik Sandewall, but who is going to peer review these comments?  We certainly don't close the open discussion at the time of peer review. Additional discussion is possible later on.

We have, up to the point where electronic communication became feasible on a large scale, run a peer review process for STM publishing that is broadly similar across disciplines.  The differences have perhaps been in timescales, which themselves are dictated by other things such as the necessity to patent certain information in some disciplines and the amount of research and information being published.  As chemistry publishers we are increasingly under pressure to publish work faster.  I doubt that open peer review or the dual system proposed by Erik Sandewall meet the needs of our authors.

The intensive phase.  The current average time from receipt to publication in RSC's flagship journal, Chemical Communications, is under 80 days and decreasing!  I think this raises the distinct possibility of divergence of peer review policy among disciplines.

Review of times of one year are not uncommon in our area, and even up to two years. Apart from all other considerations, this is so much that at interferes seriously with the concept of priority for first appearance of the result. This is even more true if one accepts the stance that "every reasonable article gets published eventually, but maybe they have to try in a second ranking journal if they don't make it to their first choice". This is the reason why we preferred to view the article as published (for priority purposes, for example) *before* it is subjected to review discussion and considered by referees.

Decreasing!  I think this raises the distinct possibility of divergence of peer review policy among disciplines.

True, but maybe that is just as well. The circumstances surrounding publication are already so different that it is misleading to compare publication performance in different fields only in terms of the nominal parameters, such as the number of articles published.