How to Write an Effective Referee Report and Improve the Scientific Review Process

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1. I an a senior ecosystems & complexity scientist in semi-retirement, past president of the int. soc. for systems science, have reviewed a fair number of papers on novel, breaking concepts. I want to say that the criterion of the paper beinf of wide interest is incorrect for science because threshold and potentially breakthrough ideas may not already be well known. Not only is there already a bias against them because reviewers tend not to approve what they are unfamiliar with. Adding the need for the subject to be of wide interest means we will not get truly threshold ideas, and that will slow scientific progress. Wide interest is also already a bias with editers wanting to maximize distrbution for economic reasons, so there is already plenty of restriction without building it into the review process. Narrow and potentially important should be just as desirable as broad and important, otherwise we perpetuate the emphasis on having science about things that are already known, vs science about things we need to learn.