Liz Wager on conflicted peer review

There has been an interesting discussion in the Steig thread about whether Eric Steig should have been invited to be one of the reviewers of the O'Donnell paper or not. On the one had there is the fact that Steig, being the subject of the critique, had a conflict of interest. On the other, he would have been the person best able to point out possible flaws in the O'Donnell paper. Opinion among commenters appeared divided. With this in mind I wrote to Liz Wager at the Committee on Publication Ethics - an advisory body for scientific journals - to ask for her thoughts. Here they are:

Should an author whose work is the subject of a criticism in a submitted manuscript be among the invited peer reviewers of the manuscript?

COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) doesn't issue general guidance or proscriptions on how peer review should be done but we do mention criticisms in our Code of Conduct for editors, namely

"Cogent criticisms of published work should be published unless editors have convincing reasons why they cannot be. Authors of criticised material should be given the opportunity to respond.

Studies that challenge previous work published in the journal should be given an especially sympathetic hearing."

In developing this guidance, we had in mind letters to the editor rather than new analyses/papers but recognise that practices differ in different areas (apparently maths journals never print correspondence so if you want to criticise another person's work you have to write a new paper).  So COPE says that the authors should be given the opportunity to respond to specific criticism of their work, but we do not provide guidance about whether they should peer review papers criticising their research.  We leave that up to the editor.

Liz Wager, Chair COPE

Comments

[neil]

sorry typo above imeant (to think any "reveiw"not "reveiwer" would be beyond their reach)

[mark]

http://climateaudit.org/2011/02/11/ryan-odonnell-responds/

don't look like much retracting doin' to me. a bit. a lidl bit.

[Mailman]

Mark,

Well, that was a bit of a non-apology...especially if you take in to consideration what Steig was saying over at RC (that RO was about to profusely apologise for his mean words).

Regards

Mailman

[BBD]

Well, this is the latest I can find from O’Donnell himself. Apologies if its been posted already and I missed it.

From comments at the Blackboard, Lucia (blog owner) reproduces an email from O’Donnell (emphasis added):

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/odonnell-apologizes-to-steig/

lucia (Comment#69195) February 11th, 2011 at 2:40 pm

[snip]

Everyone,

I am going to take a break from this for awhile. I thank all of you for your kind worse, suggestions, and help. And just in case, while I’m gone, you get stuck in a corner, I will reprint below verbatim what I guaranteed to Eric. Revkin was copied on this as well:

“I explicitly stated that part of my problem with Eric’s post is that he twice misrepresented the references and selectively used the portion of my response that fit his argument. However, since he was not given our third response, he is unarguably owed both a public correction and an apology with respect to this part of my post. In addition to this, based on the above, I do not feel that my public characterization of “duplicity” with respect to the iRidge criticism is supportable enough for me to stand on the sidelines while it travels around the internet, and this term (along with other uses of “dishonesty”) will be striken. While some of you may disagree, as I was the one who made the original accusation, I feel that I should be allowed to withdraw it. I request that everyone run the correction and apology (both of which I will supply).”

I have apologized for exactly what I told him I would apologize for.

I apologized in a stand-alone post exactly as I told him I would do.

I have requested exactly the edits I told him I would request.

Ryan

[Don Pablo de la Sierra]

J

But it does happen, commonly, in many fields of science, so I don't think that what happened to O'Donnell's paper was abnormal practice dreamed up by the editor specially for this paper as a way to gatekeep it.

People are people, and this all happened in my day 40 years ago. And will happen 40 years from now as well. I do not deny it has, is, and will happen.

But that does not make it right. That is why we have law, courts and prisons. Steig deserves to have his degrees rescinded. That will not happen, but until people are made responsible for their conduct, misconduct will be common place.

Sorry, but I do not accept "but others do it" as an excuse. That was settled at Nuremberg. in 1947

[Peter O'Brien]

I haven't had time to read all the comments but it seems to me quite clear that the author of a paper challenged by a subsequent paper SHOULD NOT be a peer reviewer of the latter. His recourse is to submit a rebuttal paper to peer review.