Braun Tibor, Schubert András (szerk.): Szakértői bírálat (peer review) a tudományos kutatásban : Válogatott tanulmányok a téma szakirodalmából (A MTAK Informatikai És Tudományelemzési Sorozata 7., 1993)
MARTIN RUDERFER: The Fallacy of Peer Review: Judgement without Science and a Case History
RUDERFER: THE FALLACY OF PEER REVIEW 195 out his error and he would have been forced to respond more accurately. Closed-loop operation is the way nature and man minimize errors in all types of systems. Why not in the judgement of manuscripts, particularly for the few revolutionary ones vis-a-vis the more common evolutionary ones, as in the current case of the possibility of a serious error in the record? I cannot help but wonder why you did not take me up on this instead of repeating the same old error-prone open-loop process. By improperly rejecting the MS you are merely passing the buck. The Cannon-Jensen matter is a double error, it occured in your journal, and it should be rectified in your journal. Editors are just as culpable as referees for inefficiencies in the review process. Instead of exercising their supervisory role, editors usually concur with referees without question and end up merely as correspondents between authors and reviewers. I have found only about 1 in 10 editors take an active helpful role in ensuring a proper review. In one case an editor insisted on a closed-loop resolution with speedy beneficial results. Perhaps the matter of atomic timekeeping seems to you and the referees to be too remote from today's problems and therefore not worth the effort to pursue a proper conclusion. But the travesty that has occurred with my MS could equally have occurred in some urgent area, as energy, a field for which you obviously have much concern. How many potential solutions to the energy crisis have been denied publication by errors in the review process? I know of several simple potential solutions which warrant investigation, yet I hesitate to offer these to the scientific journals because of the three P's — Politics, Personality and Prejudice — which too often substitute for technical rigour in evaluating unsolicited manuscripts. The time and aggravation involved just do not seem worth the effort. Science is the printed record. The referee process, by controlling this record, has a crowbar effect on the development of science. Errors in this process, by delaying or preventing dissemination of useful ideas and results, have a marked depressive effect on technological growth. Improved efficiency in dissemination of key developments would speed solutions to all problems compared to the rate under the existing slow and burdensome review process. Sincerely, Martin Ruderfer. Appendix P Author's comments on review of "One-Way Doppler Effects .. ." The referee has confused the one-way travel time T with the proper time t. His initial expression (27r(fT - x/X)) is meaningless since T is defined by the distance between source and receiver. The correct expression should be 27r(ft - x/X). The remainder of his "derivation" is thereby useless. Furthermore the referee's result cannot be correct since it does not agree with equation (8). This equation is the basis for relativistic aberration and should have alerted the referee that something was wrong with his derivation.
