Scientists often describe themselves as a community. If this description is true, then that community has grown "nastier and nastier" in the past 30 years, according to one participant at a retreat for US National Cancer Institute postdocs last week in Ocean City, Maryland. The remark came during a workshop on scientific publishing that I took part in. The nastiness, she said, manifests itself most often in the form of hostile, disparaging remarks in referee reports during the peer-review process — usually cloaked in anonymity.
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