Peer review is not a piece of cake

On Monday Jenny Rohn published a blog post Peer review is no picnic that concludes:

So the next time you hear someone asserting that scientists aren’t critical, of their own work or that of their colleagues, remember that if a finding has made its way into a reputable journal, it’s most likely despite every last objection that the researcher and all of his lab-mates could come up with – to say nothing of those nasty peer reviewers.

As always with Jenny’s blog posts, the discussion is as interesting as the blog post itself. Joe Dunckley, Maxine Clarke, Austin Elliott, David Colquhoun, and others wrote thoughtful comments about peer review (the comments are now closed). Peer review is an important topic that I want to write more about on this blog (I wrote The Value of Peer Review after attending SciFoo 2009).

Jenny normally writes at Nature Network (Mind the Gap), but for this post was invited as guest blogger for the Guardian science blogs. They launched just last week and for the Blog Festival blog have started to invite guest bloggers such as Stephen Curry (Nature Network) and Mo Costandi (scienceblogs.com).