Peer Review in the Life Sciences (BIOL-Z620)
This graduate course will focus on the practice of peer review of scientific manuscripts, which is essential for what is, currently, by far the most widely accepted means of communication of scientific results: publishing papers in scientific journals. The process of peer review plays an important role in refining the body of work prior to final publication. Yet, peer review is rarely taught to students in a formal setting, and is largely dependent on individual labs and mentors, leading to variable standards of peer review. Reflecting the evolution of technology, society and scientific culture, preprints have gained popularity in the life sciences in recent years, resulting in a shift in how progress in the life sciences is communicated, and raising questions of how we, as a scientific community, may work towards optimizing the peer review process in the life sciences. This class will use the preprint server BioRxiv as a platform for formally teaching students how to peer review manuscripts in a critical and constructive way. Students will compose reviews that will be posted (either named or anonymously through Alizée Malnoë acting as an “editor”) as comments associated with the preprint on BioRxiv. This class is modeled on James Fraser course at UCSF.