Journals and funders confront implicit bias in peer review

Report on an AAAS forum session where experts brainstormed ways to allow a more diverse community of science and technology innovators. The AAAS forum featured presentations by journal editors, federal funders, and researchers. Editors cited a U.S.-centric bias as a major problem in peer review. Edward Campion, of the New England Journal of Medicine noted, for instance, that countries with fewer resources disproportionately suffer “diseases of poverty,” yet those countries are poorly represented among reviewers, and therefore risk receiving less attention than they deserve. Similarly, at the American Chemical Society (ACS), a large portion of submissions in 2015 came from China and other countries in Asia, but those authors remain somewhat underrepresented in terms of published output, said Heather L. Tierney, managing editor, ACS Publications.