RESPONSE TO SANDEWALL'S  ALTERNATIVE VIEW TO PEER REVIEW
Robert Parker
Royal Society of Chemistry

Erik Sandewall's contribution describes a very nice refinement to open review.  However, I think most chemists would be horrified by the thought of peer review taking three months for the initial phase plus a bit longer for the intensive phase.  The current average time from receipt to publication in RSC's flagship journal, Chemical Communications, is under 80 days and decreasing!  I think this raises the distinct possibility of divergence of peer review policy among disciplines.

We have, up to the point where electronic communication became feasible on a large scale, run a peer review process for STM publishing that is broadly similar across disciplines.  The differences have perhaps been in timescales, which themselves are dictated by other things such as the necessity to patent certain information in some disciplines and the amount of research and information being published.  As chemistry publishers we are increasingly under pressure to publish work faster.  I doubt that open peer review or the dual system proposed by Erik Sandewall meet the needs of our authors.

Perhaps chemistry is less contentious and results less open to multiple interpretation than other disciplines.  Certainly the vast majority of decisions as to acceptance or rejection are very straightforward for chemistry articles using traditional peer review.  The traditional method meets our current needs: it is fast (and getting faster with the elimination of postal delays by using electronic communication) and, we believe, reliable.

Finally, with electronic versions of journals it is very easy to append additional files to the electronic equivalent of the printed journal (electronic supplementary information etc.). This provides the opportunity of including comments from the open community received post-acceptance. Perhaps this is a half-way house to the dual peer review proposed by Erik Sandewall, but who is going to peer review these comments?