Anthony Ross-Hellauer
At present, there is neither a standardized definition of “open peer review” (OPR) nor an agreed schema of its features and implementations, which is highly problematic for discussion of its potential benefits and drawbacks. This new series of blog posts reports on work to resolve these difficulties by analysing the literature for available definitions of “open peer review” and “open review”. In all, 122 definitions have been collected and codified against a range of independent OPR traits, in order to build a coherent typology of the many different adaptations to the traditional peer review that has come to be signified by the term OPR and hence provide a unified definition.
The use of journal hierarchy for assessing the reputation of research works and their authors has contributed to a competitive environment that is having a detrimental effect on scientific reliability. Open access repositories administered by Universities or research organizations are a valuable infrastructure that could support the transition to a more collaborative and efficient scholarly evaluation and communication system. Open Scholar has coordinated a consortium of six partners to develop the first Open Peer Review Module (OPRM) for institutional repositories. The module integrates an overlay peer review service, coupled with a transparent reputation system, on top of institutional repositories. It is provided freely as open source software.
This initiative shares a vision of an independent, democratic academic evaluation model free from the conflicts of interest imposed by the agendas of journals and their commercial publishers. It aims to promote complementary strategies to comprise the ingredients needed to attain this goal and to encourage scholars and interested parties to experiment with new modes that can assist the transition to free, independent, open and transparent peer review. In addition, it considers that any platform developed to implement free and open peer review should be independent of intermediaries. To mitigate potential conflicts of interest such platforms should ideally be under the management of an open community, be open source and operate in a non-profit manner.
nature.com
This is a collection of Blog items, published on nature.com, dedicated to Peer Review.
Richard D. Morey, Christopher D. Chambers, Peter J. Etchells, Christine R. Harris, Rink Hoekstra, Daniel Lakens, Stephan Lewandowsky, Candice Coker Morey, Daniel P. Newman, Felix D. Schonbrodt, Wolf Vanpaemel, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Rolf A. Zwaan
Openness is one of the central values of science. Open scientific practices such as sharing data, materials and analysis scripts alongside published articles have many benefits, including easier replication and extension studies, increased availability of data for theory-building and meta-analysis, and increased possibility of review and collaboration even after a paper has been published. Although modern information technology makes sharing easier than ever before, uptake of open practices had been slow. We suggest this might be in part due to a social dilemma arising from misaligned incentives and propose a specific, concrete mechanism—reviewers withholding comprehensive review—to achieve the goal of creating the expectation of open practices as a matter of scientific principle.
