Article by David Adam: “Attached to the Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) allows researchers to probe the most distant galaxies. It’s a popular instrument: for its next observing session, from October to April, scientists have applied for more than 3,000 hours of observation time. That’s a problem. Even though it’s dubbed a cosmic time machine, not even MUSE can squeeze 379 nights of work into just seven months.
The European Southern Observatory (ESO), which runs the Chile telescope, usually asks panels of experts to select the worthiest proposals. But as the number of requests has soared, so has the burden on the scientists asked to grade them.
“The load was simply unbearable,” says astronomer Nando Patat at ESO’s Observing Programmes Office in Garching, Germany. So, in 2022, ESO passed the work back to the applicants. Teams that want observing time must also assess related applications from rival groups.AI is transforming peer review — and many scientists are worried
The change is one increasingly popular answer to the labour crisis engulfing peer review — the process by which grant applications and research manuscripts are assessed and filtered by specialists before a final decision is made about funding or publication.
With the number of scholarly papers rising each year, publishers and editors complain that it’s getting harder to get everything reviewed. And some funding bodies, such as ESO, are struggling to find reviewers.
As pressure on the system grows, many researchers point to low-quality or error-strewn research appearing in journals as an indictment of their peer-review systems failing to uphold rigour. Others complain that clunky grant-review systems are preventing exciting research ideas from being funded…(More)”.
