Abstract
To achieve the desired outcome of quality and rigor, the process and management of peer review must be conducted ethically, requiring each stakeholder to perform their actions according to established best practices. This chapter discusses the importance of peer review in scientific and academic journal publishing, and examines the ethical issues inherent in key areas of the process. It also offers a discourse on the implications of unethical practice for both the reputation of peer review processes themselves and the inviolability of the corpus of literature they serve to guard.
The chapter begins by briefly introducing readers to the purpose of peer review, outlining its different stages, identifying the key groups involved in the process, and explaining why it is essential to the integrity of all journals that the process of peer review is performed ethically. It continues by looking specifically at various ethical issues that can arise during peer review as opposed to issues associated with publication ethics. While issues in publication ethics have received considerable attention, our understanding of good (and bad) ethical practices during the undertaking of peer review is less comprehensive and can be dependent on culture.
These issues raise questions about the wider implications of unethical peer review. To fail at any point in the process, by introducing bias, competing interests, misconceptions negligence or ignorance could harm future research outcomes. Various case studies involving a failure in the peer review process leading to questionable data being published will be drawn upon. These illustrate the importance of peer review being conducted ethically and the necessity of strong management or leadership from journals and their editorial offices in order to protect the integrity of the journal, academic literature, and, ultimately, in the case of biomedical publishing, public health. The chapter concludes with a broader discussion of ways in which peer review in journal publishing can be conducted in an ethical fashion.
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Roberts, J., Overstreet, K., Hendrick, R., Mahar, J. (2020). Peer Review in Scholarly Journal Publishing. In: Iphofen, R. (eds) Handbook of Research Ethics and Scientific Integrity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76040-7_5-1
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