What is it about?
This was a short letter I wrote to the editor of the prestigious journal Nature, responding to a proposal that scientific peer reviewers should have to follow a formal "code of conduct." I argued against this idea. My main point was that a reviewer's primary duty is to act as a rigorous gatekeeper for the scientific community, not as a helpful mentor to the authors of a paper. A reviewer's job is to give the journal editor an honest, unfiltered judgment on whether a paper is valid and worthy of publication. I worried that a code of conduct would pressure reviewers into only giving "constructive" feedback, preventing them from recommending an outright rejection of a paper that is fundamentally flawed or incorrect.
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Why is it important?
This letter was a defense of the traditional, critical role of peer review in maintaining high scientific standards. It argues that the integrity of science depends on reviewers having the freedom to be critical—even blunt—to prevent incorrect or bad science from being published. It makes the important counter-argument that trying to make the review process "nicer" could actually harm it. If expert researchers feel their critical judgment is being constrained, they may become less willing to volunteer their time for reviews, worsening an already existing shortage. Ultimately, the letter reinforces the principle that the responsibility for producing high-quality work lies with the authors, not with the reviewers who volunteer to check it.
Perspectives
I wrote this letter as a very early career researcher, right after finishing my undergraduate degree. I was already doing a lot of peer review at the time, and I had strong feelings about the process. I saw a push to make peer review more "mentoring-focused," and it struck me as fundamentally misunderstanding the reviewer's role. From my perspective, a reviewer donates their expert time as a service to the field to ensure quality, not as a free service to help an individual author get published. My belief was—and still is—that peer review needs to have teeth. Reviewers must be free to say, "This is incorrect and should be rejected," without being forced by a code of conduct to find something positive. Diluting that critical function weakens science as a whole. In the years since, I've recanted this partially-- having seen a lot of academic misconduct due to reviewer anonymity (trashing work reviewers shouldn't have taken on due to conflicts of interest / gratuitous citation requests).. but the core concept still stands: that the integrity of the scientific record depends on reviewers being tough, honest gatekeepers.
Rohit Goswami
University of Iceland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Don’t pull punches in peer review, Nature, October 2019, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1038/d41586-019-03024-2.
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