{"id":1732,"date":"2009-06-17T22:23:07","date_gmt":"2009-06-17T22:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/06\/17\/outsourcing_peer_review\/"},"modified":"2009-06-17T22:23:07","modified_gmt":"2009-06-17T22:23:07","slug":"outsourcing_peer_review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/06\/17\/outsourcing_peer_review\/","title":{"rendered":"Outsourcing peer review"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was interested by an article<\/a> in this week’s Nature1<\/a><\/sup><\/em> about the Italian government outsourcing some peer review to the American NIH.
\nThis seems like it could be a useful exercise for some governments, in some circumstances. However, I was surprised to read that Italian researchers will not be brought into the peer review committees. It seems to me that there would be more potential for two-way learning if Italian science were represented during the entire process. I read a lot of blog posts about the NIH (and NSF) systems, and there are clear cultural differences even to Canadian peer review, so one might expect that there would be an even greater gulf between US and Italian practices. Every country will have different research priorities and academic structures, after all, and proposal rankings decided by foreign scientists might not translate into the optimal research portfolio for a smaller state.
\nIt will be interesting to see how this experiment pans out, but I expect that wholesale outsourcing of peer review to a foreign government will always be an exception rather than a rule. Mixed nationality peer review committees, on the other hand, sound like a very interesting idea. I’m sure this already happens within the EU, and with specific collaborative agreements between different countries; does anyone have any experience in this area?<\/p>\n

1<\/sup> accessed through the website, as all attempts to click RSS feed items from within Google Reader are resulting in “DOI not found” errors from The DOI System<\/a>, rather than taking me to the relevant article on the Nature<\/em> site in the usual way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was interested by an article in this week’s Nature1 about the Italian government outsourcing some peer review to the American NIH. This seems like it could be a useful exercise for some governments, in some circumstances. However, I was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}