It's really unfortunate that reviews are seen as competitive and confrontational. I want my reviews to be suggestions to help the authors.
Because of that, I don't want the reviews I write made public. Reviews are for the editor to assess the author's work and for the author to make the work better. They are not commentary for the public to understand the work.
Fixing the paper is the author's job. Not mine. I want to be able to say "There was a paper a long time ago by someone like XYZ who you should go read." Or "There's a whole literature here by people like ABC to go engage with." Finding that literature is the author's job. Not mine. I want to be able to say "what if X is not linear?" or "what if Y happens?". I don't want to have to work out the math myself. That's the author's job. Not mine. None of this should be public.
Moreover, I need a process to say "I have the following concerns with my own review. I have this knowledge and not that. So you can trust me here, but not there." (Which deanonymizes the review, BTW.) I need a process where I can say to the editor, I'm concerned about A, but it's not my knowledge-base, or I think they should fix B, but it's not that important if they don't. Deciding what of that to communicate to the authors is the editor's job. Not mine.
Given the current ecosystem of publishing reviews and of preventing me from providing context to the editors separate from information sent to the authors, I am very seriously considering turning down all review requests from now on. (But it seems unfair to add publications to the ecosystem while not doing my part to review them.)
@adredish Disclaimer: I'm going to say something slightly extreme that I'm not 100% sure I agree with or not yet because I'm thinking out loud here.
If you thought your reviews were suggestions to the author to help them, then you were being tricked all along.
If authors want suggestions, they ask their colleagues who give them private feedback. A review cannot and never could be that. In a competitive process, you simply cannot give helpful suggestions as part of an evaluation. This is just false, and everyone on the receiving end knows it. Anything that is less than stellar and positive about the paper as it is makes it less likely the paper gets accepted. We have to stop promoting this false idea about reviews, and ideally we have to stop reviewing in this way.
Incidentally, it's the same thing that is wrong with annual appraisals. I don't know about your institution, but mine asks us to say what went well and badly in the last year and set targets for the next year. They say it's part of a conversation designed to help our professional development. But, they also use this feedback from the people involved in this "conversation" in our promotion process. So guess what? Everyone treats it as the bullshit that it is. They lie. They don't talk about the things that really didn't go well, and their worries and anxieties and the things they need help with. And if they are honest, they are more likely to be looked over for promotion in favour of those who lie, who end up running the institutions.
We have to stop engaging with these fundamentally dishonest processes.
@knutson_brain@adredish but it is a competition nonetheless. Not every paper gets published and your reviews are a key part in determining which do and which don't. Not everyone gets to stay in science, and which papers get published is a key part in determining that. I think we all have to remember when we're writing reviews that this is what we're doing. And we don't have to. If you want to do cooperative review, announce publicly that you'll give private feedback on manuscripts if people send them to you. But don't review for competitive journals if you're not comfortable with the role of determining who gets a paper and who gets to stay in science, because that's what reviewing is about.
@neuralreckoning@knutson_brain@adredish I suspect the extent to which publication is a competition varies by field/venue. I work in a very niche computer science adjacent topic, which is almost universally misunderstood by readers outside the topic area. When reviewing, the vast majority of my comments are aimed at improving understanability, and explicitly marked as to be used at the author's discretion. I only do this for papers I recommend be accepted, and I can't recall one being rejected.
@neuralreckoning@knutson_brain@adredish Indeed. My attitude to publication peer review is possibly not aligned with any of the other participants. I'd be happy to review preprints and consider reprinting to be publication. (As an independent researcher with no access to an institutional library, I consider anything paywalled to be unpublished and would not cite it if I could possibly avoid it. I think paywalled papers are effectively "personal communication".)
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