According to an editorial in last week’s Science, Pfizer recently filed a motion in a federal court here in Massachusetts to get the New England Journal of Medicine to fork over the confidential reviews of papers it’s published about some of Pfizer’s drugs. Plaintiffs are suing Pfizer, claiming that its COX-2 inhibitor drugs caused heart disease and other health problems. So the drug giant wants to dig through the reviewers’ reports in hopes of finding something that will help its case.
Don Kennedy, Science’s chief editor, says that doing away with confidentiality in peer review would undermine the integrity of peer review and would go against the public interest of having a fair assessment of scientific and medical research. What do you think? Some have argued that reviewers’ reports should be made public after a specific period of time post-publication.
An NN blogger, Martin Fenner, has weighed in, saying that we should resist the temptation “to move the scientific argument from the editorial office to the courtroom” or else “the peer review process and the way we communicate science will never be the same again.”
It looks like there are two slightly different issues here, and for me Kennedy wasn’t very clear about which one he was addressing.
One is whether referee’s reports should be signed, and also whether they should be made public. That’s something for which I think there are reasonable arguments for all approaches.
The other is whether a report that was written on the assumption of confidentiality can be released. My feeling there is that there has to be a pretty good case that there is a good reason to do this, otherwise any system that assumes confidentiality breaks down, because of the worry that confidentiality may be broken at a lawyer’s whim. From what Kennedy writes, there doesn’t seem to be any strong reason to suspect there to be anything useful to Pfizer’s case.
Nature ran an editorial on double-blind peer-review a couple of weeks ago, which generated a lot of opinion. The editorial is posted on Peer to Peer, where comments are still very welcome. Lots of points have already been made—mostly it has to be said from the point of view of the submitting author rather than the peer-reviewer.