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Conflict(s) of Interest in Peer Review: Its Origins and Possible Solutions

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Abstract

Scientific communication takes place at two registers: first, interactions with colleagues in close proximity—members of a network, school of thought or circle; second, depersonalised transactions among a potentially unlimited number of scholars can be involved (e.g., author and readers). The interference between the two registers in the process of peer review produces a drift toward conflict of interest. Three particular cases of peer review are differentiated: journal submissions, grant applications and applications for tenure. The current conflict of interest policies do not cover all these areas. Furthermore, they have a number of flaws, which involves an excessive reliance on scholars’ personal integrity. Conflicts of interest could be managed more efficiently if several elements and rules of the judicial process were accepted in science. The analysis relies on both primary and secondary data with a particular focus on Canada.

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Notes

  1. Global phone use and technologies of video communication via the internet make possible oral communications at distance. However, as argues Randall Collins (1998), technologically mediated oral communications imply a significantly lesser degree of emotional involvement and far less intensive generation and exchanges of ‘emotional energy’, especially if they are not preceded by face-to-face interactions.

  2. The dictionary based on substitution includes a number of words and their combinations corresponding to each qualitative code. For instance, the entry ‘Republic of Letters’ includes such words as credib* (* refers to any letter or their combination), fair*, honest*, integrit*, objectiv* and such combinations as public_trust and research_community. In contrast to qualitative codes that are manually (hence, as some argue, subjectively) attributed to particular fragments of the text, the analysis using a dictionary based on substitution is run automatically: the user instructs the program to attribute a code to any specified word or a combination of words.

  3. In the case of SSHRC their ‘expected level of education is a university degree (a graduate degree is an asset) with some experience in research, for instance, as a research assistant, or in research administration’ (International Blue Ribbon Panel 2008, 72).

  4. Or, in order to respect principles of meritocracy, all members who met a well specified criterion, e.g., the minimal number of publications in journals with a significant impact factor, or have the minimally specified number of references to their work.

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Acknowledgments

The author is indebted to the Science and Engineering Ethics anonymous reviewer(s), Dr. Judith Adler, Prof. Volker Meja (both—Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada) and Dr. Alexandre Metraux (University of Mannheim, Germany) for their valuable comments and suggestions. Sheryl Curtis of Communications WriteTouch (Montréal, Canada) helped improve its style.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL, Canada

    Anton Oleinik

  2. Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

    Anton Oleinik

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Correspondence to Anton Oleinik.

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Oleinik, A. Conflict(s) of Interest in Peer Review: Its Origins and Possible Solutions. Sci Eng Ethics 20, 55–75 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-012-9426-z

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