Peer review is important. Like a guard by the gates to the garden of enlightenment, it ensures that only worthy pieces of scientific literature are widely disseminated. It blocks misleading, mistaken and down-right dangerous papers from gaining traction, affecting public opinion, shaping policy and wreaking havoc. Usually, anyway.

But peer review is complicated. I've only been reviewing for a few years, and have only reviewed 12 papers, so I can't claim to be the world's foremost reviewer of biology manuscripts. What I can provide are the fresh (naive) thoughts of an early career researcher (ECR) and relative newcomer to the reviewing game. I've identified two main problems with writing and receiving peer reviews, and done my best to come up with solutions, after discussion with other ECRs (most notably Alecia Carter and Corina Logan).

PROBLEM 1: Receiving peer reviews can be the most unpleasant piece of text you will read about yourself and your work, ever. Peer reviews rarely congratulate you for good ideas, hard work and gutsy attitude. Instead, they savagely highlight all the flaws. They can be rude, thoughtless and occasionally wrong, and are not a nice final step in the long journey towards a piece of scientific literature.

SOLUTION: I sign all my reviews. Most reviewers don't want to be unpleasant, yet the cloak of anonymity means lapses into clumsy, cruel criticism do not have consequences. By signing all my reviews, I cannot accidentally write something unnecessarily harsh. I cannot forget to congratulate the authors for their hard work, and wish them luck with their paper (whatever the outcome). Instead, I write thoughtful, helpful, constructive reviews, even when I think the paper is garbage.

This is usually very easy - most papers I review are good quality, and for the rest I don't feel that deciding to reject (albeit politely and helpfully) would bite me in the ass later in my career. Even in the worst-case-scenario (rejecting a paper from a rival lab) the decision to sign has not only been without cost, it has had huge benefits! I've been approached at conferences and workshops, and thanked for my helpful comments. I've been congratulated on the decision to sign reviews. The reviews I've signed have started chats about science that would otherwise never have happened. 

I STRONGLY encourage everyone to sign all their reviews, except where doing so would be life-threatening or completely career-ending.

PROBLEM 2: Writing a helpful, constructive review (which you will have to do, if you are signing it!) is hard work for no money. 

SOLUTION: I only review for journals I consider 'ethical.' If I am donating my time and expertise, I need to ensure that the recipient is deserving! Journals that are for-profit, remove money from academia and are not open-access (or charge extortionate OA fees) clearly do not deserve charity from me.

When I receive a request to review from an 'unethical' journal, I accept. I then immediately return a blank review, with a confidential note to the editor explaining my decision. For 'ethical' journals, I also include a confidential note, congratulating them on their policies and explaining my decision to review for them.

As well as giving me the warm feeling that I'm contributing my time and brain to a worthy cause, this has the added benefit of screwing up and delaying the review process for 'unethical' journals. Don't feel too sorry for them: these journals charge authors publication fees, and then charge readers to access the papers. And most of the money is removed from academia. Why not use that money to pay for conferences, or grants, or studentships? Perhaps a clunky, delayed review process might encourage these journals to change their policies, or even encourage authors not to submit there anymore.

So in summary: sign all your reviews, and don't do unpaid work for the bad guys. Simple.

And as a reward for reading this far, here is a picture of a baby elephant shortly after crossing a river with its mother. Remember: the same task may be more challenging for some individuals than others. And it is not their fault.

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We are seeking two highly motivated field assistants to spend one year with our habituated meerkat population in the southern Kalahari Desert. For more info see our website

Hurry! The deadline for applications is 17th April 2016!

The Southern Kalahari is currently suffering through its worst drought in over 20 years! There was less than 2mm rainfall per month in October, November and December 2015. We would normally expect 30mm per month during the so-called 'rainy season.'

This is having a devastating effect on the meerkats, which pregnancies failing, pups dying, and adults losing weight. Groups are forced to forage so widely that they end up separated, and can take several days to find one another.

Many hands make light work - my new open-access paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In animal societies, cooperation can confer long-term benefits, including a boost to future breeding and survival. How can sharing a workload now allow an animal to breed more in the future? Equally, how can working hard now have a detrimental effect on future reproduction and longevity? I had a feeling oxidative stress may play a role.

I wanted to test whether reproductive effort increased exposure to oxidative damage, and whether cooperative sharing of workloads could reduce these costs. To address this, I used a tricky clutch-removal experiment, lots of videos of feeding at the nest, and much blood sampling.

The results revealed that, in small breeding groups, the costs of reproduction were clear: elevated exposure to harmful oxidative damage, which can lead to future diseases and ageing. However, in big breeding groups, there were no such costs. In larger social groups, additional helpers were sharing the burden of offspring care, and allowing all birds to avoid exposure to oxidative stress. Work rate even scaled with antioxidant protection: those that worked hardest had the weakest antioxidant defences.

This was by far my favourite paper to emerge from my PhD research on the sparrow weaver project. The results suggest that oxidative stress may play a central role in the evolution of cooperation: while reproduction can carry significant costs, cooperative 'oxidative load-lightening' may have evolved to avoid these costs!

Suffered from illness during the recent winter? Maybe you need stronger antioxidants!

(Assuming you are a small sub-Saharan weaver bird, and your illness was experimentally induced by a standardised immune activator and a perspiring field researcher).

The immune system has frequently been linked with oxidative damage and antioxidant protection. There's even a lovely meta-analysis from 2009, which concludes that immune responses can promote oxidative stress (although it is a noisy relationship). However, almost all studies to date have been done in captivity. I wanted to see if the relationship holds in the wild.

We often feel that the bar is growing higher and higher in evolutionary biology. As young researchers hoping to establish successful academic careers, we have the uneasy feeling that we must publish more papers, in better journals (whatever that means) and get more citations, and boost our h-index. Now, Brischoux and Angelier's 2015 paper has provided some concrete evidence that our 'uneasy feeling' is worryingly accurate.

The authors examined the profiles of researchers who had been granted CNRS 'junior researchers' positions between 2005 and 2013. They found that during that short time, the number of papers needed for success had nearly doubled, from around 12 to over 20. Equally, career duration and papers published per year saw strong rises. 

So what is driving this? Isn't it a good thing, that young researchers are being more productive? The authors argue that the 'publish or perish' dogma means that young researchers remain in precarious contracts for longer. Worryingly, this may lead to some strong scientists leaving academia before they become established. Even more worryingly, their findings reveal that the impact factor of the published research is not rising, suggesting young scientists are not taking risks or being creative, and the 'quality' of science is not increasing. Instead, early career researchers may be 'salami-slicing' (ie dividing findings into the minimum publishable unit - MPU or publon) with the specific goal of getting more papers from a dataset, rather than publishing creative or elegant findings.

There are other explanations. Perhaps evolutionary biology is seeing more and more papers with long author lists, and young researchers in the last few years have profited from this. CNRS recruitment would then merely reflect this trend by raising their standards for acceptance. It would be interesting to investigate only first-author papers. 


The dataset would also offer a fantastic opportunity to relate quantity with 'quality' of publications, yet the authors haven't examined this. Are those publishing most frequently producing lower-impact papers (fewer citations, lower impact-factor journals etc)? Are there two distinct strategies: 'trigger-happy' publishers producing many lower-impact papers, and other researchers producing fewer papers, but in higher impact-factor journals? Which strategy is more likely to lead to CNRS glory?

The paper also drew my attention to Scientometrics, a journal dedicated to statistical assessments of the quality, development and mechanisms of science . What could be better? It is full of interesting papers!

The first rains have fallen in the Kalahari! The dry season is finally over, and the Kalahari is bursting with new life. Right on cue, the meerkats are getting frisky, and we have many pregnancies and several litters of newborn pups. This photo shows JubJub, a dominant female, heavily pregnant. She and I lumbered sweatily after the rest of the group as they excitedly chased rovers, fled from Martial Eagles and explored foraging patches. JubJub gave birth in a burrow a few days later!

Picture the scene: you battle to get funding for your research, you trudge through data collection and analysis, write and re-write drafts of your paper, navigate the treacherous peer-review process and - FINALLY - get your paper published! HURRAH!

Next, you decide to build on your work, and repeat the same experiments with additional factors or treatments. This time, to your dismay, the results don't match those of the first time around. What do you do?

Too often, one of two things happen:

• You abandon this research. Clearly something weird is going on, and further research might just confuse things. You can't afford confusion: you need high-impact papers, and you need them yesterday. As researchers, it is our duty to share our findings, and sweeping inconvenient results under the rug must stop.
• You power through and write-up your new results. Journal after journal reject your manuscript, claiming it is 'not novel' and that they 'do not publish studies which repeat work published elsewhere.' Journals have a duty to publish research, regardless of how impactful or 'sexy' they think it is (what do they know anyway?).

For too long, the above issues have meant that studies that fail to replicate published findings never see the light of day. This is not just a problem for the unlucky researcher who can't get their paper published - it affects the entire field. Think of the countless hours and funding other labs may be wasting in a vain attempt to replicate the findings of others.

Bucking this trend, Brown-Schmidt and Horton recently published a paper detailing a total failure to replicate their own published results from several years earlier. They should be congratulated for their honesty and integrity (indeed, their paper has received a huge amount of Kudos on Twitter).

Bravo too, to PLOS, for publishing this study. Too many journals would reject this paper based on the title alone. Yet shouldn't these results be seen by the research community, and the public who funded the work? PLOS ONE plays a valuable role in ensuring any properly-conducted research is freely accessible to one and all. For these reasons and many more, I've decided to send my next paper to PLOS ONE. As a study dominated by extra-large p-values, it is at risk of becoming a publication bias statistic! Let's see what the folks at PLOS ONE think of it...

As the northern hemisphere begins to slip into winter, it is time for me to fly south once again. I am gearing up for 2 months in the sweltering Kalahari Desert, feverishly collecting data from our population of habituated meerkats. More news soon!