Peer Review—The Newcomers' Perspective

C reated under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientifi c, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as an offspring of the " International Forum of Young Scientists, " the World Academy of Young Scientists (WAYS) was offi cially launched in November 2003 at the World Science Forum in Budapest, Hungary. Our organization represents a permanent global platform for young researchers, and presently gathers some 2,000 members in all disciplines from about 100 countries. WAYS benefi ts from the support of a number of distinguished senior scientists, including several Nobel laureates. Our objectives are to make science more attractive, comprehensible, and accessible, and to support career development opportunities for young scientists from around the world. WAYS encourages interdisciplinary collaboration and networking among scientists, irrespective of their age or institutional affi liations. We provide a global forum to communicate the opinions, concerns, and questions of young scientists to decision-makers in science policy. At our fi rst general assembly in December 2004 in Marrakech, Morocco, peer-review procedures in scientifi c publication and research funding were debated intensely. Even though peer review is universally accepted as an essential element of research, considerable debate persists on how to implement it. The vast majority of our members, especially from developing countries, were concerned about the apparent unfairness of the current procedure, a perception that is prone to generate frustration, fear of discrimination, and distrust. We reached a consensus that slight modifi cations to the current review process would help in getting more objective reviews based on the quality of the research rather than the age, affi liation, gender, or pedigree of the authors. Single-blind peer review (SBPR), in which the reviewer knows the identity of the author but not vice versa, is the currently accepted practice. Because SBPR can be vulnerable to sexism and nepotism [1], its ethical foundations have come under criticism; the method is frequently recognized to be biased against new ideas, women, young scientists, career changers, and scholars from less prestigious universities and⁄or from developing countries (see [2] and references therein). Generally, two policies have been proposed to eliminate bias from the peer-review process: open peer review and double-blind peer review (DBPR). In open peer review, the identities of both authors and reviewers are revealed, affording the authors the ability to identify the reviewers' comments to a person. Even though this might be an equitable strategy to prevent unfair rejections, this process has …