Open peer review in the era of open science: a pilot study of researchers' perceptions

Abstract

The quality of Open Access journals is an important issue in developing digital library collections. Traditional criteria, such as peer review, may not be able to identify the quality of peer- reviewed publications. Open peer review (OPR) has emerged as an innovation of open science. OPR is still at an early development stage with various models, from revealing identities of the author and the reviewer to publishing the entire peer review history of the accepted paper. This pilot study utilizes qualitative interviews to investigate researchers' perceptions and attitudes towards the emerging publishing model. Through semi-structured interviews with seven researchers, this pilot study reports on the thoughts and opinions of the interviewees towards OPR and proposes further studies on the potential of OPR in scientific publishing.