He reiterated his statement in his evidence to the GMC, "There was no question in my mind that subject to external peer review and editor debate, we should publish this work," he said.
By soliciting opinion pieces and by selecting, from among the growing list of contributed articles, the very few that will be sent out for peer review, the editors promote their vision of what constitutes "groundbreaking" and "policy relevant" science.
However, that is not the intended external face of peer review, and editors make judgements on what is best for any given manuscript every day based on just a few rational principles.
Thus, when papers are received that need considerable revision before being sent out for peer review, the editors will elect to have authors revise the paper before review which means the paper will not automatically be rejected as is often the case for other journals.
The usefulness of peer review for editors' decisions to accept submissions for publication cannot be fully determined using Taylor and Russell's [13] model and tables.
In this paper we presented an approach that in addition to validity points to the importance of the base rate and selection rate for determining the utility of peer review for editors' publication decisions.
Following further post-publication peer review the Editors no longer have confidence in the soundness of the findings.
The way to maintain control is to make a point of sending our most newsworthy scientific articles and opinion pieces to the journals of our own professional societies, in which the peer review process is editor-facilitated, rather than editor-directed.
These recommendations are by no means comprehensive, but they would improve accountability of those involved in the peer review process: authors, editors and reviewers.
The Senior Editor who handles the manuscript will take this into account when deciding whether or not it merits in-depth peer review by a Reviewing Editor and one or more external referees (Schekman et al, 2013a): as a result, a higher-than-average percentage of manuscripts from early career authors receive in-depth peer review.
The reader of a scientific paper in a high-quality journal knows that the information has been vetted by a formal process of peer review, moderated by editors.
