It's time for fair peer-review!
The Issue
Namaskar!
The week of September 21 every year is dedicated as a peer-review week. Peer-review plays a very important role for a researcher in various fields and phases of his/her career in maintaining scientific quality. As a strong proponent and advocate of open access, I firmly believe that the fair review for scholarly articles, journal submissions and even preprints to a certain extent would usher the way we bring the three Cs, which I call it as Consistency, Continuity and Credibility.
Having said this, my appeal to all researchers is on "fair peer-review" for grant submissions in India which unfortunately is in infancy. This is surmounted and backed by nepotism and favoritism for certain sections of researchers. Post COVID times, when the whole scientific community is cordoned off by the malice, we as humans should converge and bring one-ness in thoughts, debate and action. Let there be a fair peer-review in evaluating grant applications. This should herald the growth of researchers rather the grants submitters simply being acknowledged by one word "rejection." Adding to this, many a time, the researchers when requested with the reason why a grant is rejected , s/he would end up with no man's paradise and there is no response at all many a time. This is not only demotivating but also very univiting! The I in the "researcher" would be doomed by this approach. To counter this, my appeal to Government of India, secretaries and ministries of science and technlogy, Department of Biotechnology in particular is to
(a) ensure there is a fair peer-review for grant submissions. If the proposal falls in the ambit of call, then s/he (the submitter) must be duly acknowledged and if not must be supported with detailed comments. However, it is unto the discretion of the agency whether to reveal the name of grant evaluator.
(b) saying NO to nepotism and have a clear competing/conflicts of interest statements mentioned as per the peer-review rules like in the journal sections.
(c) let the comments from peer-reviewer and abstract of the grant proposal made public. There is no copying the ideas for that we should firmly believe and respect the novelty of the grant submissions.
You may be well aware that these things are in practice in the west especially the European Union ( Euraxess, ERC). Such changes brought innovation and doing good science to the fore. When small countries in Europe could bring that change, why not, we in India where we dream of bringing science as a best practice by 2047?
Come, please join me in signing this petition. You could be "anonymous" if you want! but it's time we all joined hands together. I have a fair hope that we Indians are good listeners!
Thank you and looking forward.
Prash
Prashanth N Suravajhala, PhD
Founder, Bioclues.org and
Senior Scientist, Systems Biology
Birla Institute of Scientific Research, Jaipur
https://www.bioinformatics.org/wiki/Prash
PS: Image courtesy: mcmurryjulie from Pixabay
Petition Closed
The Issue
Namaskar!
The week of September 21 every year is dedicated as a peer-review week. Peer-review plays a very important role for a researcher in various fields and phases of his/her career in maintaining scientific quality. As a strong proponent and advocate of open access, I firmly believe that the fair review for scholarly articles, journal submissions and even preprints to a certain extent would usher the way we bring the three Cs, which I call it as Consistency, Continuity and Credibility.
Having said this, my appeal to all researchers is on "fair peer-review" for grant submissions in India which unfortunately is in infancy. This is surmounted and backed by nepotism and favoritism for certain sections of researchers. Post COVID times, when the whole scientific community is cordoned off by the malice, we as humans should converge and bring one-ness in thoughts, debate and action. Let there be a fair peer-review in evaluating grant applications. This should herald the growth of researchers rather the grants submitters simply being acknowledged by one word "rejection." Adding to this, many a time, the researchers when requested with the reason why a grant is rejected , s/he would end up with no man's paradise and there is no response at all many a time. This is not only demotivating but also very univiting! The I in the "researcher" would be doomed by this approach. To counter this, my appeal to Government of India, secretaries and ministries of science and technlogy, Department of Biotechnology in particular is to
(a) ensure there is a fair peer-review for grant submissions. If the proposal falls in the ambit of call, then s/he (the submitter) must be duly acknowledged and if not must be supported with detailed comments. However, it is unto the discretion of the agency whether to reveal the name of grant evaluator.
(b) saying NO to nepotism and have a clear competing/conflicts of interest statements mentioned as per the peer-review rules like in the journal sections.
(c) let the comments from peer-reviewer and abstract of the grant proposal made public. There is no copying the ideas for that we should firmly believe and respect the novelty of the grant submissions.
You may be well aware that these things are in practice in the west especially the European Union ( Euraxess, ERC). Such changes brought innovation and doing good science to the fore. When small countries in Europe could bring that change, why not, we in India where we dream of bringing science as a best practice by 2047?
Come, please join me in signing this petition. You could be "anonymous" if you want! but it's time we all joined hands together. I have a fair hope that we Indians are good listeners!
Thank you and looking forward.
Prash
Prashanth N Suravajhala, PhD
Founder, Bioclues.org and
Senior Scientist, Systems Biology
Birla Institute of Scientific Research, Jaipur
https://www.bioinformatics.org/wiki/Prash
PS: Image courtesy: mcmurryjulie from Pixabay
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Petition created on 19 September 2020