The system of peer review for scientific publications is based on the idea that your scientific peers anonymously evaluate the quality of your work prior to publication, in order to ensure that only meaningful articles that are actually worth publishing are printed. The same system is used for the evaluation or research funding/grant applications.
However, your peers often are your competitors in scientific research, when it comes to securing research funding/grants, or when it comes to the subject of being first in publishing novel findings or innovative research results. The more innovative the outcome of the research, the bigger the problem.
In a world where it is increasingly difficult to secure funding for scientific research due to decreasing or tight budgets, is it fair and practicable that you are forced to present your latest research results and innovative research proposals to possible/likely competitors, who without further scientific control can block your publication or grant application, and who gain knowledge that allows them to copy your ideas or to scoop you? How can the interests of authors of scientific articles or grant applications be better protected?
This is an ongoing debate; see e.g.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_the_peer_review_process_flawed_for_academic_articles
Hello, I agree with the idea that the peer review system is flawed, yet this process is absolutely necessary in science. (I consider it flawed for various reasons I will not detailed here). As a possible solution, I suggest that the peer review system should be made open to any expert and non-expert of the fields, in a completely anonymous manner where both reviewers and authors ID are hidden during the review - or multiple - review process. Review & comments can be up-voted or down-vote by the community, like it is on many web-platforms. I expect the review from experts to become be more pertinent, but I think non-expert can raise concerns about several aspects, maybe the clarity of the explanation, methods details, etc. How to determine the duration of the 1st review process is an issue, maybe after a given number of votes the review can be stopped by the authors, if they desire so. Then comes 2nd round,... Once the author(s) estimate that enough advice from peers were obtained, and that the quality of the work has improved significantly, then author(s) alone release the paper. Note that editor is completely absent from this effort. I also suggest we incentive the review process by rewarding the "best" answers, which way of doing so should be decided by a democratic vote within the community. Finally, to ensure the above voting processes, the necessity to ensure 1 vote (one ID) per researcher is of course required. Something like that.
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