Why don't science magazines print peer reviews along with the original articles?

Question

It would seem that it would be a better way to present science as it truly should be. Now the peer reviews are printed later (if at all) and the "News" organizations latch onto bad information disseminate it to people who don't ask any questions and take pretty much everything at face value.

Also don't you think that funding for research should be blind (the scientists don't know who they get the money from) in order to eliminate bias in their work?

Answer 1

What you are talking about is something called "open review."  In the past, open review wasn't done because it cost a lot of money to typeset print, and paper is expensive.  Reviews of articles, and the rebuttal/responses of the authors can many times be as long as the article itself.  Publishing the peer-reviews would therefore greatly increase the page count of the journals.  There are some journals that publish "discussions" of papers along with papers, and most journals allow comments on papers to be published.  

Open review is more common now with the advent of online publishing.  The best example of this is the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, published by the European Geophysical Union.  The "Discussion" section of the journal is published online, and there, for all to see, is the entire peer-review of each paper submitted to ACP.  This model has turned out to be quite popular with authors and reviewers alike and I suspect many journals will move in this direction.  But because of the cost issues I've given above, it is highly unlikely that you will ever see the entire peer-review process published in print with the paper.  

The second part of your question, about blind funding, is simply not practical.  You have to know who you are submitting a proposal to in order to be successful.  A proposal for an applied research project to the Department of Defense is a very different document than a basic research proposal to the National Science Foundation.

Answer 2

Two reasons:

First, there's a big imperative to publish as soon as results are verified by the investigator.  Scientists get credit for their work based on who got there first.  Waiting for peer reviews would slow things down.

Second, space.  Print space in a magazine costs money; got to have enough advertising and subscription income to pay for the paper.  Mags are always looking for articles, too, so printing a story and then later printing the review articles spreads stuff out.

Answer 3

The "peer review" that precedes the publication of a paper is not scientific research. Its purpose is just to verify that that the work appears to have been performed and reported in accordance with good scientific practice. Follow-up research that corroborates, refutes, or amends the original findings usually comes later, when other scientists have had a chance to evaluate the paper. The responsibility for critical thinking falls on the news organizations, reporters, and their audience, who don't so so well with other sorts of news either.

As for blind funding, I think there is some distortion of science by corporate sponsorship. I'm not sure how a blind funding system would work. It would have to be double-blind, too; otherwise the corporate sponsors simply fund the proposals most likely to give them the results they want.

Answer 4

First of all, 95% of the readers a technical paper are researchers who work in the same field or a closely related field as the subject of the paper. These people are just as qualified to judge the scientific merit of a particular paper as the reviewers. Publishing the review articles would not be of significant use to them.

Second, the scientific world is filled with a lot of extermly smart people with huge egos. And when these big shots are selected to be on review commitiee they're not always kind. Reguardless of who is correct, if a big shot researcher publicly critizes the research of a new scientist it can destroy his creditibility and career. So keeping the content of reviews cofidential is a way of protecting new scientist.  

  

Finailly, a lot times the review process is filled with debates over semantics. These dabates are in my opinion silly and there is no reason to publish them.

As for you comment about the reviews helping the reporters, i disagree. A good reporter after encoutering a paper they want to do a story on would first contact the author(s) and then try to contact sevieral other experts in that field. Better yet, they could look up who the reviewers were, and contact them as well. Often when the news latches onto bad science its a result of poor journalism and someone looking for a quick and easy story.

And no, I don't think funding should be blind. It my introduce some bias, but direct communication between researchers and the industry is key to indentifing and studying the particular problems of interest.