The third congress on peer review will be in Prague in September 1997

Peer review is slow, expensive, prone to bias, corruptible, and possibly anti-innovatory.1 Yet it is central not only to the production of scientific journals but to all of science. Like democracy it may be an imperfect process, but it is better than the alternatives.2 3 4 Or is it? Just as nobody has conducted a randomised controlled trial of cervical screening against placebo so nobody has done such a trial of peer review. Such a trial would probably now be impossible--as it is deemed to be for cervical screening--but editors and others are beginning to research the process of peer review.4 5 6 Most questions about the …