Peer review is at the heart of scientific publishing. It is the process by which grants are allocated, papers published, academics promoted, and Nobel prizes won. Through the process of peer review, a manuscript is evaluated by experts in a specific field, revised and improved by the authors, and then finally accepted for publication.
The problem with peer review is that, despite its rigor, it suffers from bias because reviewers are competing for the same recognition and resources.
The solution, though, is not to eliminate peer review, but to make the whole process more transparent and ensure that the academic publishing industry is genuinely meritocratic in nature.
But first, let’s analyze the discrimination issues the current academic publishing process faces.
The Hegemony of White Men
It’s no news that academia, and particularly STEM[1], has a diversity issue. Despite many recent efforts, academic circles remain largely populated by men – white men[2] more precisely!
Attempts to address this issue have yet to prove successful – 33% of universities in the United Kingdom are actually regressing[3] in terms of the number of women in tenure. Why? It seems discrimination starts even before graduate school!
In 2012, Katherine Milkman (University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia), along with several colleagues, sent emails to 6,548 professors at 259 U.S. institutions, pretending to be students wanting to discuss research opportunities. They wanted to test how likely faculty members were to respond to a request to meet with a student depending on his or her race. The e-mails used were identical, only the names were different, selected to be easily recognizable by gender and ethnicity.
The results? With an overwhelming majority, the study showed that professors were more likely to respond to white men[4] than women
