Should authors get a grade for peer reviewing? It's indisputable that, if done well, peer-review activities are a time-consuming contribution to science — and can easily be overlooked by a tenure committee.

A guest post by Willy Aspinall of the University of Bristol, UK, on the Peer-to-Peer blog earlier this month suggested that peer-reviewing activities be scored with a metric that takes into account how many reviews a scientist performs in a year and the impact factors of the journals involved (http://tinyurl.com/d7w4ys).

That post sparked Nature associate editor Noah Gray to respond on his blog, Nothing's Shocking, that such a metric “seems wildly over-simplistic and hardly quantitative” (http://tinyurl.com/cnulcj). Gray takes issue with the idea that peer reviewing is truly a solo undertaking. He goes on to suggest that it would be more appropriate to track authors' contributions through their Web 2.0 interactions and public commenting on science — what he calls “peer review lite”.

He argues that until the review system becomes public and non-anonymous, there is really no way of applying a meaningful metric.