NYT on Improving the Peer Review Process 

 Wednesday's New York Times reports on recommendations by an independent panel on how the journal Science could improve its review process (see  here ).  The panel was instituted after Science had to rectract papers by Dr. Hwang Woo-suk that were based on fabricated results.  The panel recommended four changes: 

 (1) Flag high visibility paper for extra scrutiny in the review process 
(2) Require authors to specify their individual contributions to a paper 
(3) Make more raw data available online for replication 
(4) Work with other journals to establish a common standard for the review process. 

 Recommendations 3 and 4 has previously featured on this blog  here  and  here .  (2) should produce interesting results in joint publications.  Maybe a logical extension would be to asses academic output by using the contributions as weights?