Bye Bye Peer-Reviewed Publishing

This work is the continuation of a ‘revolution’ started with "Research Counts, Not the Journal". Own and published opinions from worldwide scientists on critical issues of peer-reviewed publishing are presented. In my opinion, peer-reviewed publishing is a quite flawed process (in many ways) that has greatly harmed Science for a long time – it has been imposed by most academic and science funding institutions as the only way to assess scientific performance. Unfortunately, most academics still follow that path, even though I believe most do it for the fear of losing their job or not being promoted. This paper aims to encourage (i) a full disruption of peer-reviewed publishing and (ii) the use of free eprint repositories for a sustainable academic/scientific publishing, i.e. healthier (no stress/distress associated to the peer review stage and the long waiting for publication) and more economic, effective and efficient (research is made immediately available and trackable/citable to anyone). On the other hand, it should be pointed out that nothing exists against scientific publishers/journals – actually it´s perfectly normal that any company wants to implement its own quality criteria. This paper is just the way chosen to promote the quick implementation of suitable policies for research evaluation.


Why I Really Don´t Care About Peer Review
In traditional scientific journals (still the greatest amount available), any paper first gatekeeper is the managing or scientific editor. The articles overcoming that hurdle are sent out to 2 to 4 "experts" in the field (also called peers or reviewers), who are asked to provide in an independent way their views on (i) the quality of the paper and (ii) whether or not it should be accepted for publication in that journal ('major-revisions and re-submission required' is an intermediate verdict often allowed). Once the scientific editor gets all reviews, her/his final decision on the paper acceptance is formulated and communicated to the authors. This is the traditional and widely implemented (pre-publication) peer review. In my opinion, peer-reviewed publishing is a quite flawed process that has greatly harmed Science for a long timeit has been imposed by most academic and science funding institutions as the only way to assess scientific performance.
Unfortunately, most academics still follow that path, even though I believe most do it for the fear of losing their job or not being promoted. Why, for me, doesn´t peer-reviewed publishing make any sense, and is a waste of my precious time and health? i. Would you cite some peer-reviewed work without going through it yourself to make sure the facts you are citing are correct/reliable? If yes, that's awful in my opinion. If not, then what you need peer review for? For me, peer review is naturally carried out by each reader of a publication -there´s no other way to do it! ii. Researchers (such as myself) invited many times by Scopus-or SCIE-indexed journals 1 to review papers, are simultaneously those (i) whom the editors take "as God" (reviewers) in order to make decisions on whether or not to publish somebody else's paper, and (ii) whose works are often rejected for publication by those journals.

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The peer review system is arguably better at one thing above all others: censorshipfrom contrarian viewpoints to innovations that render favored dogmas obsolete (economic threats).
The neophobia in the world of science serves to protect the status quo rather than improve knowledge.
Scientists have often fairly hefty egos. Once those egos rise to positions of power and/or influence, they can calcify the flow of scientific progressparticularly if they end up acting as peer reviewers in prestigious publications.  As an author, I am often amazed by the reviews that I receive. Some offer tangential ideas that have little to do with the manuscript, presumably to show that they thought about the subject. Others insist that their own work be cited 6 .
Regardless of the insanity of any individual comment, the authors must respectfully (often obsequiously) embrace each sentence and thank the reviewer for it. All too often, in their zeal to please the reviewers, the authors revise the paper in a way that makes it much worse than the original 6 .
The peer review process is horribly broken. " Packer (2019) 6. Happened to me most of the time since 2018, but from now on I am not disseminating my papers via peer-reviewed journals anymore. The only exception is when my co-authors "have to" do it because they like it or fear (as explained in section 1) to abandon that systemin that case (i) they are the corresponding authors (I refuse to get in touch with editors and reviewers belonging to a flawed and fraudulent system), and (ii) I will make it clear in the 'contributions' section of the paper that those changes to the original manuscript were not my contribution.

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The peer review system is deeply wrong.
A third objection is that the system is fundamentally conservative. Since the judgments are asked from people established in a field, these may not welcome innovations that can potentially challenge their fixed views. Pre-publication peer review is far from fair and objective. There is clearly a subjective element to reviewing a scientific paper. Reviewers and editors are not always qualified or free of bias. Senior investigators may be given a "free pass" because of their reputation in the field, and the work from new investigators is usually examined with much closer scrutiny.

Gender bias is another shameful problem
plaguing the review process. Actually, in my opinion, those somehow renowned scientists who (i) are the last author of most of their papers, (ii) have tens of students working for them, and (iii) rarely put their hands on real research work 7 when dealing with non-opinion papers (their job is mostly giving some ideas and/or reviewing the manuscript written by their co-authors), are likely to be against abandoning peer review. Why?
▪ Without the requirement of peer reviewing for the trustworthiness of published research, early career scientists wouldn't have to depend so much on the aforementioned renowned scientists to publish their work quickly and in a reliable way. Thus, the productivity of those senior "scientists" (not real scientists for me 8 ) would fall abruptly.
Even in the field of research management, I wouldn´t say the senior scientists described above are a model to follow, due to the large amount of PhD students they usually "supervise". If I were a PhD supervisor I wouldn´t accept having more than three doctoral students in their first three years of research.
▪ Supervising is not just answering students' questions or telling them where to search those answers. Most of all is being able to create empathy and to make students scientifically independent and passionate about science in general. But creating real empathy is a timedemanding task not compatible with busy and anxious people.
7. e.g., literature reviewing, programming, using commercial analysis software, formulation development, computations, carrying out part (at least) of the experimental work, observing and analyzing in the field, collecting data.  the high-quality factor also seems to apply to bioRxiv 10 .

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There are at least nine deficiencies in the current model that are fueling a sense that journals as we have known them are approaching their final act, such as: too slow, too expensive, too limited, too unreliable, too focused on the wrong metrics, too parochial, too powerful.
Journals tend to lack diversity in their editorial groups. This issue is true with regard to sex and race/ethnicity, as well as national origin. Science knows no national boundaries, yet journals seem to have national, and sometimes even regional, preferences with regard to their selection of submissions. There is a growing concern that the results of many peer-reviewed studies cannot be reproducedsupposedly the benchmark for good science.
" Curry (2015) 12. e.g., manipulated results, fake peer-review. Examples of peer-review fraud were described by Haug (2015) and O'Grady (2017). There is a growing movement that wants to retort as Albert Einstein did to such a review process.  Using a dataset of 1,008 manuscripts submitted to three elite medical journals, we show differences in citation outcomes for articles that received different appraisals from editors and peer reviewers. Of the 808 published articles in our dataset (not necessarily on those three elite journals), our three focal journals rejected many highly cited manuscripts, including the 14 most popular; roughly the top 2 percent.
Of those 14 articles, 12 were desk-rejected (deemed not even worthy of peer review by the editor). This finding raises concerns regarding whether peer review is ill-suited to recognize and gestate the most impactful ideas and research. It is foolish to view the published result as the only thing that counts simply because it was published. Science is not like soccer. In soccer a match result stands even if it is the product of a blatantly wrong referee call (e.g., a decision not to award a goal even though the ball was completely past the goal line).
Science doesn't work this way. We need to have a solid foundation of our scientific knowledge. We simply cannot say that once a paper is "in", the results ought to be believed. Replication and community-based review are two tools at our disposal for continuously checking the structural integrity of research.