Anonymous Closed Peer-Review is Censorship
Every self-interested entity in power wants to control public opinion. Billionaires buy newspapers, not to make more money, but to use their money to push their personal agenda. Totalitarian governments control access to free information to keep their citizens’ uninformed. The same human behavior is also visible in science, but it is often ignored.
British lords invented the “peer” (not you and me, but other lords) review system when they engaged in scientific debates as a hobby. Today, science is a billion dollar industry and scientists are self-interested actors in this system. Closed peer-review is still used to sell the public the impression that scientists control themselves to ensure that published articles meet the highest standards of scientific research. In reality, the closed peer-review system is used to control information and repress criticism.
The ability to influence the information that gets the stamp of peer-review approval is also the main motivation to take on the thankless job as an editor. The only reward is to decide which small number of submissions will get published or not. High rejection rates are used to claim rigorous quality control, but in reality, they give editors power to influence the narrative.
The problem is amplified at journals that focus on a specific narrow topic. These journals were often created by scientists who were not able to publish their work in other journals because their work was not considered important to the editors of those journals. For example, Cognition and Emotion was created in 1991 because psychology shunned research on emotions and even after the affective revolution in the 1980s, it was difficult to publish emoiton research in mainstream psychology journals.
Creating a journal to publish important work itself is a positive response to censorship. Rickard Carlson and I also used this approach to make it easier to publish research on meta-psychological topics that were difficult to publish elsewhere. However, the danger is that oppressed groups become oppressors, when they gain power. And closed peer-review gives editors at these new journals the power to control the narrative, just that it is now their narrative and their self-interests that decide what gets published. The only way to avoid this trap is to dismantle the power structure. That is what Rickard did with Meta-Psychology. First, articles are not rejected. They are improved until they meet basic scientific standards. Thus, there is no tool to suppress work because it is “not novel enough,” “only a small increment,” “outside of the scope of this journal,” or just a desk rejection with a note that the journal just cannot publish all of the important work that is done. The real reason is often that the editor did not like a paper.
In short, closed peer-review is not what the general public thinks it is. Rather than ensuring that research meets basic scientific standards, it is used to reward people to follow the party line and punish people who want to publish critical work.
Open Science Reforms
In psychology, the academic discipline I know because I worked in it for over 30 years now, the problem of censorship became apparent during the replication crisis in the 2010s. Peer-review had failed to ensure that published results are scientifically valid. Lack of training and understanding of science itself was partly to blame, but the bigger reason was that peer-reviewers were happy to publish bad research because they were doing the same bad research and were interested in publishing these results that benefited their own work. Yes, I am talking about the implicit revolution (Greenwald’s words, not mine) that seemed to show that much of human behavior was caused by mindless responses to situational cues without even noticing it. Call it implicit, automatic, or unconscious, experiment after experiment seemed to support these claims. In reality, research on the unconscious worked very much like Freud’s model of unconscious process. Undesirable results were repressed and only results that showed support for researcher’s claims were published. This became apparent after Bem even showed time reversed unconscious processes, which nobody was willing to believe. When other studies were replicated, they also failed to provide support for other claims and the implicit revolution imploded. Peer-review had failed as a quality control mechanism. Rather censorship had created a bubble of false findings. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to realize that the realization was painful and that many old researches resorted to defense mechanisms to avoid the emotional consequences of realizing that their achievements were illusory.
Open science requires open sharing of all findings and arguments. It also requires that conclusions are consistent with the evidence and logically consistent. This open exchange cannot happen in a closed peer-review system where editors control the narrative. The new quality assurance is not “peer-reviewed,” but “open peer reviews,” and publication of all arguments on both sides. It is also important to get rid of journal rankings to evaluate the quality of research. Journal rankings only ensure that editors of prestigious journals have even more power to control the narrative. I experienced this first hand. When I submitted my first critique of the Implicit Association Test to the prestigious journal “Perspectives on Psychological Science,” the editor rejected it. When I tried again several years later, a new editor accepted it. Neither decision was based on the quality of the work or the argument, it was just a personal preference.
A Scientific Utopia
Most editors also do not read articles they handle or provide their own comments. The bias is often introduced by picking reviewers that will like or dislike a paper (I know, I was Ed Diener’s henchmen, his words, not mine). So, they really do not add anything of value. Even current AI (large language models) are better able to evaluate the scientific merits of a paper and we can replace human editors with AI, a faster, more cost effective, and less biased way to make decisions about publications that are essential for young scientists’ careers.