Shame on the Scientific Journal “Environmental Microbiology” « The ...
The current Harper’s reprints Environmental Microbiology’s annual list of selected peer reviewer comments on submitted articles, featuring such snark as “this manuscript has nearly sucked the will to live out of me” and “This is an interesting... I suppose the best outcome would be if the obnoxious comments were privately addressed to the editors, and the editors correctly interpreted those comments are demonstrating that the reviewer in question was an asshole, their opinions should be... This is especially the case if the reviews were shown to the authors, but the tone would be completely inappropriate even if privately addressed to the editor (and it is standard in my field for there to be a place on the web form for comments to... Not just delete from the review, but counsel the reviewer and consider taking him or her off the list. The proper role of a scientific journal editor is to delete such comments from the review, rather than lionize them in a year end collection that will only serve to stimulate more such remarks in the future. Nasty remarks impede the scientific enterprise by crushing the spirit of very bright people who take such remarks personally and thereby do not revise and resubmit quality scientific work. More than being a mistake, comments are these are also likely to be relatively ineffective, as they make the reviewer appear unreasonable and possibly unreasoning, and so their judgment is easier to dismiss. Scientific publication without peer review is possible. Formally the papers are preprints, prior to publication in peer-reviewed journals. Famously, the proof of Poincaré’s conjecture by the eccentric genius Grigori Perelman has never been submitted for peer review: he says it’s pointless. Speaking as someone who has given fairly tough, but eminently, even elaborately respectful peer reviews in the past, I agree with the condemnation of the destructive and juvenile tone seen in the quotations. Either way, peer review by a tiny subset of that community is irrelevant. I well recognize the impulse to write something like this when I’m served a particularly bad piece of junk to review and anonymity to hide behind. And such people are not a random sample of all authors: Women scientists are particularly likely to retreat when faced with an abusive review. Peer review isn’t sacred. Whether they intend it or not, the editors of this journal are engaged in institutional sexism as well as bad manners. But someone who gives in to it is not only personally cowardly and shameful, but manifests a misunderstanding of the duties he’s accepted in undertaking the task, and puts his scientific judgment in question. Either another mathematician will show his proof is invalid, or the proof holds up against the scrutiny of the entire community of topologists. Compare the way double-blind clinical trials can’t get rid of placebo effects....
Microbiology Analyst
To perform environmental monitoring and testing of a production environment and of the raw ... 
Microbiology Analyst
To perform environmental monitoring and testing of a production environment and of the raw ...