Responding to a recent paper supporting the implementation of double-anonymised peer review criteria as a means of reducing bias in favour of high profile academics, Serge P.J.M. Horbach, Tony Ross-Hellauer and Ludo Waltman, suggest open peer review ma…
Category: open peer review
Making sense of preprints by adding context – The Publish Your Reviews initiative
Improving scientific publishing is often framed as an issue of openness and speed and less often as one of context. In this post, Ludo Waltman and Jessica Polka make the case for a more contextualised approach to open access publishing and preprinting,…
Has COVID-19 been the making of Open Science?
One outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to put discussions about open research methods and practices, such as preprints, into the mainstream. Drawing on an recent analysis of the extent to which Open Science principles have been adopted during th…
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
To address the rise of predatory publishing in the social sciences, journals need to experiment with open peer review.
Predatory journals are here, but our attention to them is unevenly distributed. Most studies on predatory publishing have looked at the phenomenon in the natural and life sciences. In this post, Maximilian Heimstädt and Leonhard Dobusch analyse the harmful potential of predatory journals for social science and specifically management research. Identifying key threats posed by predatory publishing, they argue that […]
Self-organising peer review for preprints – A future paradigm for scholarly publishing
Preprints – rapidly published non peer reviewed research articles – are becoming an increasingly common fixture in scholarly communication. However, without being peer reviewed they serve a limited function, as they are often not recognised as high quality research publications. In this post Wang LingFeng discusses how the development of preprint servers as self-organising peer review platforms could be the future of […]
Three propositions to help to cultivate a culture of care and broad-mindedness in academic publishing
Academic publishing has been transformed by digitisation over recent decades, with the review process now able to be comprehensively tracked and transparent. But despite such progress, is our publication infrastructure actually more transparent, inclusive, and with less conflict? Or are practices of exclusion and gatekeeping merely now being hidden? Diane-Laure Arjaliès, Santi Furnari, Albane Grandazzi, Marie Hasbi, Maximilian Heimstädt, Thomas […]
Not all academics are comfortable with the idea of open peer review
There are many arguments in favour of open peer review, from anticipated improvements to the speed and quality of reviews brought about by the greater accountability, through to the likely reduction in unfair or illogical decisions because of the system’s transparency. Despite this, not all academics are comfortable with open peer review and remain fearful of their comments and views […]
Reading list: a selection of posts on peer review to celebrate #PeerReviewWeek18
This week is Peer Review Week 2018, a global event celebrating the essential role that peer review plays in maintaining scientific quality. Peer Review Week “brings together individuals, institutions, and organisations committed to sharing the central message that good peer review, whatever shape or form it might take, is critical to scholarly communications”. In addition to the new posts to […]
As demands on the peer review system are increasing, reviewers are simultaneously becoming less responsive to invitations
During this Peer Review Week 2018, Tom Culley shares findings from the new Publons “Global State of Peer Review” report. As demands on the peer review system increase, reviewers are actually becoming less responsive to invitations. Meanwhile, researchers from established regions such as the USA, UK, and Japan continue to review significantly more than their counterparts from emerging regions such […]