Sir

Your News feature “Peers under pressure” (Nature 413, 102–4; 2001) on the hoary old chestnut of peer review reinforces my decades-old comparison of this ritual to the Latin mass. Obviously many (Protestant?) leaders, including most of the best-known scientists such as Nobel laureates, regard peer-review as a great hindrance to good science (the gospel?). Many excellent journals (churches?), such as the Proceedings of the Royal Society and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences managed in my opinion very well without it for a long time. An enormous amount of the best science has been and is being run without benefit of this rubric, as is the worldwide patent system.

The allusion in your Feature to Paul Chu and the 1:2:3 superconductor paper — the contents of which had clearly reached rival research groups before publication, and in which “ytterbium” was changed to “yttrium” at the last minute — points to but one of the very minor ineradicable defects of the peer-review system, that we can confirm. At the time that paper was submitted, several of its authors, including one of us (J.R.A.) who had made the very first samples of 1:2:3 at the University of Alabama, had a conversation with his Alabama colleagues and Dr Chu of the University of Houston, at which the wise decision was made to substitute Yb for Y in the text. The galley proof (still in J.R.A.'s possession) shows Yb, not Y, in all four places where it appears. The full chemical name of ytterbium — and, subsequently, yttrium — was conveniently omitted from the text of the paper so that the amendments before final printing could be confined only to the symbols. This stratagem was also alluded to in the Materials Research Society videotapes on the history of the 1:2:3 discovery, organized by one of us (R.R.). Everyone except the true believers knows that it is your nearest competitors (adversaries?) who often 'peer' review your paper. Hence, you must protect yourself by this and other subterfuges, like proposing work you have just completed.

Yet this is but a minor defect in the peer-review system. The enormous waste of scientists' time, and the absolute, ineluctable bias against innovation, are its worst offences.

'Review by competitors' is an all-too-accurate description of this system, wreaking devastation on papers and proposals in science. Financial and self-interest disclosures, such as competing for the same funds, should surely now be required of peers.

More: where is the evidence for any benefits from peer review? Recently, Nature (Nature 412, 751; 2001) and most medical journals have been forced to require financial disclosures by authors to deal with the fact that peer review could do nothing to avoid the widely acknowledged contamination of the literature. This was illustrated by papers published about the drugs Vioxx and Celebrex — just one example picked up by the secular press (Washington Post, 5 August 2001; Wall Street Journal, 22 August 2001) in front-page stories after a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (J. Am. Med. Assoc. 286, 8; 2001) reported that these popular painkillers carried a risk of cardiovascular problems. The newspapers reported that cardiovascular risks from Celebrex had been simply “omitted” from an earlier paper (J. Am. Med. Assoc. 284, 10; 2000). All sixteen authors of the earlier paper — including faculty from eight universities — were either employees, funded by or consultants of the manufacturers. What use was peer review here?

Finally, Nature should not repeat the old canards such as: “despite the problems thrown up by peer review, no serious alternative has yet been proposed”. Nonsense. They have not only been proposed but have been in regular use worldwide for a very long time. The users include the world's largest research agency, the US Department of Defense, and industrial research worldwide.