Peer reviewers: chill out and don’t let the power go to your head

This is not very helpful to the cause. Surely the task of the reviewer is to see if the paper is up to scratch and suggests way of improving it. This is a service to everyone, including the author. A default "accept" helps nobody.

These responses are interesting to me because they don't seem to me to address the main thrust of Cochrane's piece. "Treat others as you would like to be treated" should be in every journal's guidelines to reviewers. We have all seen people hide behind the anonymity of reviewing to say gratuitously nasty things about a paper. A default setting of "accept" doesn't mean you accept everything. It means avoid the temptation to create what Cochrane calls "busy work", or the temptation to ask someone to write the paper you would have liked to write with this data, instead of engaging with and commenting on the paper they did write. He also notes that he always starts with a look at the raw data and rejects if there are problems there. I can't see anything objectionable in what he's recommending.

I enjoyed reading this article and agree with most of its sentiments. As Miriam Meyerhoff suggests, a Golden Rule approach such as "Review the work of others as you would expect your work to be reviewed" is in order. I would like journal editors to make their expectations clear by indicating that reviewes are expected to be constructive, honest, ethical and scholarly. For instance, all conflict of interests must be declared (including suggestions made to cite work published by the reviewer), and all critiques of the reviewed work should be justified in a scholarly manner. Wholesale dismissal of papers without proper substantiation happens far too often and is highly detrimental to the careers of reseachers whose work deserves respect. I also think that reviewers should be challenged to think about how thier review might be received if it were made public. Could they stand behind it if their name was linked to the review? Finally, I would encourage editors to dismiss reviews that don't meet a reasonable standard and avoid sharing them with authors.

I like the article and would generally support its main points with the addition that my main concerns are with reproducibility of data, if authors take shortcuts or do cherry-picking, overstate their results or make claims of novelty without acknowledging properly the prior art in the field.