Research intelligence: how to deal with the gruesome reviewer 2

That's nothing. Destructive and abusive comments from lecturers marking Masters work that they did not teach at the University of Chester, received the same response withdrawal and a formal complaint still running.

It is clear to me that abusive, empty, aggressive comments should be disregarded as a matter of editorial policy. It is a form of anonymous trolling after all. More worrying in the long run is critical comment based on entrenched views of what the field requires. The intellectual stasis of the status quo is often the worst enemy of truly innovative research. The case of how long plate tectonics had to fight for acceptance is a good example. This is much harder for editors to deal with. Indeed they may be complicit in the process, as they will have established their reputations within existing research paradigms. I'm not sure how this can be effectively tackled. Peer review, for all its obvious flaws, remains the most reliable monitor for research excellence.

The problem is that editors are editing journals alongside writing research grants, writing articles, actually doing research, teaching, supervising PhD students, mentoring research staff, undertaking departmental administration roles. That leaves too little time for them to properly monitor and moderate reviewers' comments which means abuse, unhelpful comments are getting sent back the authors when they should've been discarded by editors. Moreover, reviewers are also reviewing papers on top of everyday academic work. This means peer reviewing falls way down, and often drops off, the "to do" list which means reviews are often rushed, hasty and undertaken when reviewers aren't in a favourable mood (in the evenings, at weekends, after being badgered by the editor). One solution is to better protect journal editorships in university workload models. Publishing houses should by out a portion of editors' time the same way UKRI does for research projects. Peer reviewers should be paid too and payments not made to reviewers who offer sub-standard reviews. That's not to say that all of the problem with peer reviewing is structural. Unfortunately, some (many) people in academia are arseholes and simply use the protection of anonymous reviewing to be nasty.