It's Peer Review Week 2024, and it's being marked by one publisher with a call for more courtesy in the process.
IOP Publishing asked four senior scientists to highlight a rude review received earlier in their career, and to describe how it made them feel at the time. Their subsequent achievements in science are then listed. Electromagnetics researcher Akhlesh Lakhtakia describes feeling outraged for a few weeks after one of his papers was described as "rubbish" in a 1988. The review adds: "Obviously the author or authors had no EM [electromagnetics] training nor physical intuition.”
You can see them, along with a list of their achievements since, on this YouTube video. Lakhtakia, for example, now leads the engineering science department at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, is the author of more than 840 journal articles, and a fellow of 9 learned societies.
Laura Feetham-Walker, IOPP’s reviewer-engagement manager, tells Nature's careers section how the video project came about. Criticism and rudeness are very different, she says.
Will open peer review make reviewers more polite, and how can editors help to set a more courteous tone?
