The need for post-publication peer review in plant science publishing

The discussion among scientists about the quality of a published paper should be a constant, dynamic process, even beyond the act of publication. A published paper should not be the final step in the half-life of a scientific manuscript and critical analysis, post-publication, through post-publication peer review (PPPR), should be part of a new and dynamic process that should be embraced by scientists, editors, and publishers alike (Hunter, 2012) as one form of ensuring scientific and academic integrity (Teixeira da Silva, 2013a). Traditional scientific publishing relies primarily on a three-step process: (1) submit; (2) peer review and edit; (3) publish. However, each of these steps has clear documented problems. The first problem related to step 1 involves the intrinsic honesty of the scientist and is the basis upon which the success of all ensuing publishing steps depend. Issues such as appropriate authorship, correct data representation and its faithful representation without manipulation all form part of the first requirement. The fact that this base of honesty has been breached in many instances has forced publishers to insist on increasingly complex signed declarations upon submission of a paper pertaining to the originality of data, the single nature of submission, and conflicts of interest (COIs). Up until submission, trust and honesty lie in the hands of scientists and authors. Apart from such signed declarations, it is rare for publishers to run detailed background checks on authorship, affiliations, or COIs prior to peer review primarily because such aspects are difficult and time-consuming to investigate or verify, especially with a global authorship. More recently, publishers tend to run detailed checks on plagiarism or duplication as a result of more data-bases and stronger web-search engines, but this may fail to reveal duplicate submissions. Therefore, although there has been an increase in the level of verification by publishers in the first step, it is still far from being a fail-safe system. The moment a publisher receives a manuscript for peer review, responsibility is transferred from the scientist to the editors and the publisher (Teixeira da Silva, 2013b). Unlike step one, in which trust was earned (from the author) by the publisher, in step 2, trust is now earned (from the publisher) by the author and the scientific community. Assuming that the author has been honest in step 1, the author would expect some basic responsibilities by the publisher, but practically speaking most likely by the editor-in-chief (EIC) and/or editor board and peer reviewers. Such responsibilities would primarily include: (a) an unbiased peer review (Chase, 2013) of the paper within a reasonable amount of time which should ideally involve a double-blind review in which the identity of the authors is unknown to peer reviewers and vice versa to avoid potential COIs; (b) the ability to protect personal information during the peer review; (c) the ability to implement quality control (QC) related to various issues (data, language, structure, literature representation) and to ensure that all peer and editorial requirements made of authors are met.