Peer review as conflict
DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.3713
Fred Hoyle wrote in his 1994 autobiography, Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist’s Life (page 159):
Referees are permitted by editors and learned societies to remain anonymous, a practice that has always seemed to me objectionable, if not indeed corrupt. Corrupt it certainly is in some cases. It is wrong that an unknown person or persons should have access to new work several months in advance of anybody else, and the more important the work, the greater is the scope for shenanigans. It is not unknown for a referee to contrive the rejection of a paper and then to make use of what he has been privileged to read. On the other hand, a scrupulous person may be inhibited from following up his own independent ideas as a result of being asked to comment on similar ideas in a paper by someone else. I am told that Wolfgang Pauli was inhibited, in essentially this way, from publishing what today we call the Schrödinger equation.
Can this last statement be corroborated?
More about the authors
Vitaly Matsarski, (olgavit007@gmail.com) Bonn, Germany.
