Sir

The peer-review system, discussed in your News feature “Publish, and be damned...” (Nature 419, 772–776; 2002), operates almost entirely on a voluntary basis. It carries some prestige, but does not really affect an individual's academic progress. This is wrong, for two reasons.

First, to whichever end of the “scientific-publishing food chain” (as your feature engagingly calls it) it is applied, peer review plays a major role in preventing pollution of scientific data with falsified or distorted information. It also decreases wasteful publication of bad science.

Second, it introduces an element of additional, independent judgment, which eliminates noise and clarifies interpretation. Thus, like an audit in the medical world, peer review is crucial in ensuring that science works properly.

In spite of all this, peer review is becoming more difficult to apply because of the increasingly scarce commodity of time. A substantial number of potential referees are declining to accept journals' invitations to review, or are unable to deliver a report, because of time constraints.

Thus, there must be more institutional support of peer review. Although scientists and editors recognize that being invited to review is an act of academic recognition, assessment-conscious institutions fail to recognize this. Yet peer review is an important service to science, and it seems obvious that scientific institutions should support it very strongly. A ranking system is needed, reflecting an individual's participation in the peer-review process, similar to his or her publication record, and this should be taken into account in performance assessments. The system could be weighted according to the impact factors of the journals served, and there could be an element of funding associated with an institution's peer-review score.

All this is necessary to take into account ever-increasing time pressures that could affect the quality of science. Peer review does not need to change fundamentally, but it should be moved higher up the list of academic priorities.