Hate the peer-review process? Einstein did too

Science Focus

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Peer review? No thanks. thierry ehrmann, CC BY Most academic papers today are published only after some academic peers have had a chance to review the merits and limitations of the work. This seems like a good idea, but there is a growing movement that wants to retort as Albert Einstein did to such a review process. Academic review process was different in Einstein’s time. In his brilliant career, the only time his work was subjected to blind peer review – the authors don’t know the reviewers and vice versa – he showed contempt for what is now the gold standard of science. Was Einstein right to be so suspicious of the peer-review process? Should we learn from him and begin to question the widespread use of peer review in academic science? The first part of Einstein’s career was in the German-speaking world. The German physics journals, in which Einstein published his breakthrough work, didn’t have the same peer-review system we use today. For instance, the Annalen der Physik, in which Einstein published his four famous papers in 1905, did not subject those papers to the same review process. The journal had a remarkably high acceptance rate (of about 90-95%). The identifiable editors

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