A Reminder of Your Roles as Applicants and Reviewers in Maintaining the Confidentiality of Peer Review

Dr. Richard Nakamura is director of the NIH Center for Scientific Review.  Imagine this: you’re a reviewer on an NIH study section, and receive a greeting card from the Principal Investigator (PI) on an application you are reviewing. A note written inside the card asks that your look favorably upon the application, and in return, the PI would put in a good word with his friend serving on your promotion committee. Do you accept the offer, or just ignore it? Or, do you report it? Or this: a reviewer on an NIH study section finds that one of his assigned applications contains an extensive statistical analysis that he does not quite understand. So he emails the application to his collaborator at another university and asks her to explain it to him. Or what about an investigator who submits an appeal of the outcome of review, citing a particular reviewer as having told him that another reviewer on the study section gave a critical review and unfavorable score to the application out of retaliation for an unfavorable manuscript review? Or maybe several days after the initial peer review of your application, you receive a phone call from a colleague you haven’t spoken to in quite a while. The colleague is excited about a new technique you developed and wishes to collaborate. You realize the only place you’ve disclosed this new technique is in your recently reviewed NIH grant application. What do you do? Scenarios like these are thankfully few and far between. Given the size ...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike Peer review Research integrity Source Type: funding