Moderator: Ben Bederson (APS)

Panel Discussion: Peer Review

This session is about peer review. We have four people who represent quite a broad range of opinions on this subject. All four are practicing physicists. Two of them have editorial experience. Jack Sandweiss is the senior Editor and Chair of the Divisional Associate Editors of Physical Review Letters. Lowell Brown is the senior Editor of Physical Review D. They are both high energy physicists, one an experimentalist, the other a theorist. We also have Geoffrey West, from Los Alamos, a member of the Theoretical High Energy Physics Division, and Maurice Rice, a condensed matter physicist from the Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH, Zurich, presently on leave to AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill.

Let me say one thing about peer review, addressing the question of why our journals have such a low rejection rate. We typically have rejection rates in the vicinity of 20%, except for Physical Review D15, which includes cosmology and general relativity, which has a rejection rate of perhaps double this. Of course, Physical Review Letters has a still higher rejection rate, but this is because Physical Review Letters has subjective criteria beyond scientific merit. It is my contention that the principal reason is that in most cases physicists have already critically reviewed their papers, before submission. They are in the most part sufficiently self-critical and self-analytical so that they have in effect peer reviewed their own papers. Or they've had colleagues review their papers before submission. We don't have a large group of papers which are so marginal as to require serious editorial intervention to get them acceptable or to reject them at a high rate. Paul Ginsparg, yesterday, said basically the same thing. He explained why he felt that his e-print archive papers did not require peer review, stating that they actually did require peer review but were reviewed by non-anonymous colleagues before submission. This is very similar to what would have happened if they had gone out to excellent referees in the first place. Of course, he picked his own referees, and he probably did a better job of selecting referees than we do in our anonymous referee selection.

As you can probably guess, I'm a supporter of peer review but I also believe that there are many ways in which peer review can be implemented and we will hear from four gentlemen, perhaps with different ideas about the subject. So, first I'll start with Jack Sandweiss.