Grant Review: American Idol or Big Brother?

ess, opting for a version of our current anonymous manuscript review system by eliminating face-to-face contact of reviewers would only serve to widen the error bars among reviews. Moreover, eliminating the face-toface discussions of study sections would have no effect on decreasing the submission-to-score time as reviews are due ?5 days before the study section meets. This is clearly not the bottleneck. So the next time you are hiding behind the cloak of manuscript reviewer anonymity, ask yourself if you would make these same comments if you were required to summarize them at a meeting. Better yet, would you make them about your own manuscript? Steven F. Dowdy1,* 1Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Cellular & Molecular Medicine, UCSD School of Medicine, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA *Contact: [email protected] DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2006.11.007