The Open Science training handbook is an open, living handbook on Open Science training. It is a key resource and a first step towards developing Open Access and Open Science curricula, supporting and connecting an emerging Open Science community that wishes to pass on their knowledge as multipliers.
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.
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.
Read more: Defining Open Peer Review: Part One – Competing...
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.
Read more: Open access repositories start to offer overlay...
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: