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QUALITY CONTROL IN ELECTRONIC PUBLICATION
Robert Parker
The Royal Society of Chemistry

Peer review in electronic publishing is discussed in terms of current procedure at the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the need for peer review and developments in the administration of peer review.

THE CURRENT SITUATION:
The RSC's policy on the assessment of articles has been refined over the last 150 years as described in a recent article (Williams & Kirby, Chem. Br., July 1998, p38).  The current procedure and policy can be viewed on the WWW (http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ReSourCe/AuthorGuidelines/index.asp).

The RSC's database contains details of over 10,000 referees worldwide, and this number increases by around 10% each year.  Referees are selected from this database by trained, subject-specialist, editorial staff using a combination of keywords and text provided initially by the individual referees and updated by them annually.  The accumulated knowledge of the staff is considerable: they 'know' their referees and authors, many of them personally by contact at conferences; they also know of potential conflicts between groups.  The staff also benefit from the statistical data collected on the database; for example, the database analyses response times and compares the referees' recommendations against final outcomes (acceptance or rejection).  The reports provided by the referees are scrutinised in the first instance by the editorial staff.  In those instances where the initial two referees are not in agreement an adjudicative report is obtained.  On the rare occasions when there remains any doubt about acceptance or rejection after the receipt of an adjudicative report, a member of the Editorial Board is consulted.

Where authors feel that the referees have made inappropriate recommendations these can be challenged, and with modern communications systems this need not delay the assessment process unduly.  One possible measure of the quality of the process is that in 1997 there were 125 appeals from 8823 submissions; 40 appeals (0.45% of all submissions) were successful.

Times taken for the refereeing process average 13-15 days for communications and 16-30 days for full papers. Interestingly, there is a very good correlation between time spent in review and in author revision  for individual journals.

THE NEED FOR PEER REVIEW:
It is easy to view peer review solely in a negative way, as a method of weeding out those papers that do not fit into the scope or quality parameters of a journal.  What is often overlooked is the benefit of the process to the author and the reader.  The referees look at the work with fresh eyes; they have not been involved in the research or in drafting the paper and are therefore not ingrained in the direction of the research. Authors are so closely associated with the research that they often omit salient features that are very familiar to them but may be essential for a full understanding of the work.  Most accepted papers in the RSC's journals have undergone some revision as a result of referees' or editors' comments. These alterations range from the superficial to the fundamental.  Most changes will have been suggested to confirm results or clarify their presentation, thereby increasing their utility to the reader.  But it does happen that authors can be spared the embarrassment of publishing something that is incorrect.  It is better for this to be spotted by one or two referees than the whole community.

The peer review system relies heavily on the goodwill of the referees. Referees are chosen on the basis of their specialist knowledge and may be known personally to the author.  Anonymity prevents potential disagreements between an author and a referee spilling over into personal relationships and professional collaboration.

A useful side-effect of peer review is that it ensures that for any scientific field of interest there are only a handful of journals of real importance to that field.  So to get, say, 90% of the useful papers in their field an author need scan only 4 or 5 journals.

DEVELOPMENTS IN PEER REVIEW:
An 'open' system of peer review, where all papers submitted are mounted on a web server for wide access and comments from readers are posted, has been proposed by many including Zoltan Nadasdy in his preprint for this meeting. This seems to me to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  Informed peer review by chosen experts is replaced by a free-for-all where the comments posted on a paper by readers could be from experts or by 'reviewers' who are entirely uninformed.  How are comments ranked in importance or weighted?  How is personal bias eliminated?  What happens to those papers that receive no comments from readers?  How does one stop an avid commentator from exerting undue influence on the process?  How does one encourage comments from the experts?  Is there any revision of the paper built in on acceptance?

Online bookstores have allowed the public to load book reviews on the web. The results are interesting, but they are not necessarily helpful to someone who wants to know whether or not a book is worth reading or, if it is non-fiction, whether the content is correct or riddled with errors.

In my opinion the time spent on 'closed' peer review is time well spent.  It provides a level of accreditation that authors and readers trust.  If they did not believe the system worked they would likely refuse to act as referees themselves.

The RSC is working to use electronic technology to improve times to publication.  Entirely electronic communication between the editorial office, authors and referees has been on trial for two of our journals and is about to be extended to the rest.  It remains to be seen whether sufficient numbers of referees wish to view papers on-screen or print off the text-based parts of papers sent to them electronically for review.

RSC ensures that all material submitted for publication is reviewed.  This is increasingly an issue as we offer the possibility of attaching electronic supplementary information to the electronic versions of the journals (http://www.rsc.org/suppdata/esi1.htm).