Category: gatekeeping

How the pandemic changed editorial peer review – and why we should wonder whether that’s desirable

Since its onset, COVID-19 has significantly accelerated and expanded scientific publishing. Drawing on research into open peer review in medical journals, Serge P.J.M. Horbach discusses what impact COVID-19 has had on the practice of peer review and what shifting assessment thresholds for academic research on COVID-19 might suggest about the future of peer review itself. … Continued

You can publish open access, but ‘big’ journals still act as gatekeepers to discoverability and impact

One of the proposed advantages of open access publication is that it increases the impact of academic research by making it more broadly and easily accessible. Reporting on a natural experiment on the citation impact of health research that is published in both open access and subscription journals, Chris Carroll and Andy Tattersall, suggests that … Continued