Short Description
The European Commission joined many other research funders in 2013 when it announced that one central requirement of future research grantees of Horizon 2020 would be that their research publications be made freely available to all. The Commission’s vision is open access for research outputs, as announced in its 2012 Communication. This states: “Information already paid for by the public purse should not be paid for again each time it is accessed or used, and […] should benefit European companies and citizens to the full.”
The Commission has no preferred model for how to achieve open access. It is searching for innovation wherever it may be found, from traditional commercial publishers, new organisations, distributed academic networks, and research libraries. The goal of achieving open access is a public one that sits above private interests. This sometimes means that businesses are obliged to evolve and adapt in light of the project to move towards open access.
The move to open access scholarly publishing has been accelerating for many years. It is driven by many factors, including: the emergence and expansion of the internet, which enables the fast and free dissemination of research outputs; the fact that many academic libraries are reporting the rising cost of subscription journals and the declining number of journals they can subscribe to; a moral case that publicly funded research should be freely available for all to see; and a case that more dissemination of knowledge will lead to more innovation and therefore economic growth.
Authors/Initiatives
Diane Harley, Sophia Krzys Acord, Sarah Earl-Novell, Shannon Lawrence, C. Judson King
Copyright: Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkley
Short Description
Since 2005, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), has been conducting research to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. This report brings together the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions in seven selected academic fields: archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science. The overview document summarizes the main practices explored across all seven disciplines: tenure and promotion, dissemination, sharing, collaboration, resource creation and consumption, and public engagement. In this report, readers can search various topics within and across case studies. The report identifies five key topics, addressed in detail in the case studies, that require real attention:
Short Description
This is a collection of Blog items, published on nature.com, dedicated to Peer Review.
Authors/Initiative
The Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), European Association of Science Editors (EASE)
Short Description
The aim of this combined ALPSP/EASE survey was to achieve a greater understanding of the peer review process in a variety of disciplines and to provide a set of agreed guidelines. The survey was exclusively online and was made available on the ALPSP website in October 2000. The questionnaire was highlighted in the news section of the home page and remained there for just over one month, during which 200 responses were collected and considerable interest was generated. The following report shows the results of the survey and also includes comments received by email during the time that the questionnaire was displayed
Link
https://www.alpsp.org/write/mediauploads/current_practice_in_peer_review.pdf
Short Description
The aim of this combined ALPSP/EASE survey was to achieve a greater understanding of the peer review process in a variety of disciplines and to provide a set of agreed guidelines. The survey was exclusively online and was made available on the ALPSP website in October 2000. The questionnaire was highlighted in the news section of the home page and remained there for just over one month, during which 200 responses were collected and considerable interest was generated. The following report shows the results of the survey and also includes comments received by email during the time that the questionnaire was displayed
Short Description
Changes in scholarly publishing have resulted in a move toward openness. To this end, new, open models of peer review are emerging. While the scholarly literature has examined and discussed open peer review, no established definition of it exists, nor are there uniform implementations of open peer review processes.
Short Description
Changes in scholarly publishing have resulted in a move toward openness. To this end, new, open models of peer review are emerging. While the scholarly literature has examined and discussed open peer review, no established definition of it exists, nor are there uniform implementations of open peer review processes. This article examines the literature discussing open peer review, identifies common open peer review definitions, and describes eight common characteristics of open peer review: signed review, disclosed review, editor-mediated review, transparent review, crowdsourced review, prepublication review, synchronous review, and post-publication review. This article further discusses benefits and challenges to the scholarly publishing community posed by open peer review, and concludes that open peer review can and should exist within the current scholarly publishing paradigm.
Authors/Initiative
Anthony Ross-Hellauer
Short Description
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.
Short Description
This is part two of a series of posts describing OpenAIRE’s work to find a community-endorsed definition of “open peer review” (OPR), its features and implementations. As described in Part One, OpenAIRE collected 122 definitions of “open review” or “open peer review” from the scientific literature. Iterative analysis of these definitions resulted in the identification of seven distinct OPR traits at work in various combinations amongst these definitions:
Short Description
Many researchers have strong views on peer review. To find out what early-career researchers think eLife Early-Career Advisory Groupconducted a survey in which 10 questions about different aspects of peer review were asked. A total of 264 researchers took part in the survey, including 146 postdoctoral researchers (55% of the total), 61 group leaders (23%) and 51 PhD students (19%). The survey was conducted in September 2017.
Short Description
Objectives: To examine the effect on peer review of asking reviewers to have their identity revealed to the authors of the paper.
Design: Randomised trial. Consecutive eligible papers were sent to two reviewers who were randomised to have their identity revealed to the authors or to remain anonymous. Editors and authors were blind to the intervention.
Short Description
Together with tenure, peer review is probably the most distinctive feature of the modern academic system. Peer review, we are told, sets academia apart from all other professions by construing value through peer judgment, not market dynamics.
Short Description
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.
Short Description
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.
Short description
The traditional forms of scientific publishing and peer review do not live up to all demands of efficient communication and quality assurance in today’s highly diverse and rapidly evolving world of science.
Short Description
Today’s academic publishing system may be problematic, but many argue it is the only one available to provide adequate research evaluation. Pandelis Perakakis introduces an open community platform, LIBRE, which seeks to challenge the assumption that peer review can only be handled by journal editors. By embracing a new culture of open, transparent and independent research evaluation, the academic community can more productively contribute to global knowledge.
Short Description
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.
Short Description
This large-scale international study measures the attitudes of more than 4,000 researchers toward peer review. In 2009, 40,000 authors of research papers from across the globe were invited to complete an online survey.
Short Description
A project report and associated recommendations, proceedings from a meeting and background papers.
Short Description
This global survey reports on the attitudes and behaviour of 3040 academics in relation to peer review in journals. Peer review is seen as an essential component of scholarly communication, the mechanism that facilitates the publication of primary research in academic journals.
