The Scientific Peer Review Process is Not Broken it is Just Abused

Dr. Eric Steig's recent encounter with the uneducated masses illustrates one major point, the scientific peer review process is abused. Today he admitted on a blog post at Real Climate that he was indeed a reviewer of the O'Donnell et al 2010 paper that was critical of the statistical methods on his 2009 cover paper for Nature magazine. There is nothing unusual about an author of a paper being criticized being allowed to review the criticism prior to publication. It is nearly the norm and should be the norm and is an important part of the peer review process.

Etiquette would demand that the criticizer openly offer the criticized that courtesy and in return the criticizer should consider the opinion of criticized. Open, honest exchange of ideas is not new to scientific progress nor is heated disagreements.

What Dr. Steig did was try to maintain anonymity while he pointed out disagreements he had with the rebuttal paper. That is not proper form by most rational thinkers. No matter how he responded to the paper, his trying to maintain anonymity was a poor choice on his part. It is not open, it is not honest and it is not right. That summarizes what is wrong with the peer review process.

It is not surprising that he took the lower road. There is a back room political mentality that has become a part of the scientific process. The financial stakes are too high to not tempt individuals to cross ethical boundaries. Laws are written to attempt people to reconsider ethical behavior. If he were an accountant for a company, a researcher for a pharmaceutical or involved nearly any other field of study, he would be under investigation. Climate science is not held to such legal standard or should it be. It should be held to an ethical standard by the peers of the field. It is up to the scientists to police their own neighborhood. It is up to others to determine the validity of the research before investing or acting on the bottom line conclusions.

The political decision making process is complicated by attitudes like this, "As a reporter wrote to me today "it's simply impossible for a lay observer to make a judgement on his/her own." Really?!" which Dr. Steig included in his response published on the scientific blog Real Science. That makes me wonder, who is qualified to be the gate keeper?

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