The public in peer review

Public involvement in scientific research is not new, particularly with respect to clinically relevant research. In the 1900s, for example, Mary Lasker pushed for a disease eradication model of health, while the activism of patients with HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s helped to shape research agendas in the early part of the HIV epidemic [1]. Today, crowd‐sourced funding for research is becoming more common, with patients directly funding the work of scientists. Individuals still make a difference: Bill Gates, for example, has been supporting and shaping research in malaria and HIV vaccines for years through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In fact, the idea that patients or even the extended public should be routinely involved in science, specifically in the review of grant proposals, is already well described, for example, in the review of the US Department of Defense's Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (http://cdmrp.army.mil). Individual citizens, still called ‘consumers’ in DOD parlance, not only evaluate research based on whether it might be beneficial for patients, but also sit with scientists to evaluate individual projects for grant approval. Most of the …