Dürfen Universitäten Qualitätsstandards für Rezensionen festlegen?

Scientific reviews are subject to unwritten requirements such as fairness and transparency (Helmuth Schulze-Fielitz) and demand that members of the scientific community take ethical principles to heart. However, what could be transferred from the masters to the scholars in small academic communities on both sides of the Atlantic is in danger of being forgotten in the age of digitalization. Whereas in the past it was large daily newspapers that had to decide whether to moderate their angry writers of letters to the editor or give them a forum, today it is blog operators and the publishers of internet journals. The mode of agitation is more or less the speech mode of the online community. The lasting »damage to the corridor« is not always considered, nor are the underlying power relations. In this respect, the question is not so much whether the current self-representation are detrimental to free science, but rather whether they should not be used to contribute to improving the review culture. When it comes to reviews, members of the scientific community are required to refrain from non-scientific considerations in their own review processes. The same applies to editors of scientific journals, who are also not completely free from vested interests. Editors of scientific journals are obliged to oppose non-scientific considerations in review processes and to take care to avoid them, as well as not to promote such reviews themselves out of sensationalism or to increase circulation.