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We need to reward good reviewers

Posted by lee_de-Wit on 16 Nov 2011 at 21:58 GMT

Thanks for an interesting article, clearly it prompts us to think about better ways of working together to ensure the reliability of published results. I would agree with the advantages of the obligatory publishing raw data, but I also feel your work highlights the need to encourage as effective a peer review process as possible. I know of reviewers who ask for and re-analyse raw data, providing a really valuable service to the rest of the scientific community, for which the reviewers are largely unrewarded. Maybe in addition to the 'impact factors' by which our own papers and careers are evaluated we need to work out how to quantify more explicitly people's contribution to the peer review process such that we motivate ourselves to set aside the time we need to do it justice.

No competing interests declared.