The tradition of scientists critically appraising each other’s work is one of the cornerstones of modern science – though it is not without its problems.

Over in the arts, Howard Davies, the LSE director, caused a storm in literary circles when, in his speech at the at the Man Booker awards dinner, he laid in to the authors-reviewing-authors cosiness of the book review world.

So should science and the arts rely on peers to assess the quality of the work?

As David Lister puts it in the Independent,

Theatre directors don’t review plays. And film stars don’t review the new releases. So why are so many novelists allowed to pass judgement on the literary efforts of their friends? … It is only the art of book reviewing that sees novelist reviewing novelist, academic reviewing academic, historian reviewing historian, friend reviewing friend. Thus, what should be a critical discipline can become an old pals’ act, a networking club, a publisher’s convention.

Lister goes on to point out, though, that theatre critics have recently been criticised for “being out of touch,” “Keith Richards attacked a music critic for not reflecting the euphoria of the audience at a Rolling Stones gig”, and David Puttnam disapproves of “film critics seeing movies only with other reviewers.”

In my experience, there’s examples of review incest in film and theatre reviewing, but I get the feeling that the majority of film and theatre reviews are written by full-time film and theatre reviewers. Whereas in book reviewing, though there are some excellent professional literary reviewers and editors, reviewing books is one of the panopoly of ways that authors supplement their hideously low average income.

Lister suggests three measures to bring back credibility to book reviewing:

• Commercial objectivity: “no book should be reviewed by a writer whose work is published by the same house as the writer he is criticising.”
• Personal objectivity: “no book should be reviewed by a known colleague and friend of the book’s author.”
• Obligational objectivity: “no reviewer should be allowed to review a book by a writer who has reviewed a work by that self-same reviewer.”

How would that fare for science? Much of the criticism of peer review seem to be about reviewer bias – bias against innovation and originality according to some critics, reviewers that express prejudices or have conflicts of interest according to Joan E. Sieber, in Nature. So would codes for personal, commercial and obligational objectivity work in peer review?

In principle, yes, though there’s a fundamental difference between book reviewing and science peer reviewing – book reviews tend not to be anonymous, whereas peer reviews always are. And none of this will solve peer review’s other problems – like detecting fakes.

The British Academy has another suggestion – improve the status of the peer reviewer via the RAE. In this, they are perhaps unwittingly taking a leaf out of the arts’ reviewers’ book – by raising the status (in kudos, if not paying) of being a peer reviewer, this brings it to a similar level to the status of the professional theatre, film or book reviewer.