Open Peer Review Process Research Articles

The fading of status bias during the open peer review process

The growing number of preprints allows reviewers to identify the authors’ identities prior to the peer review process. Yet, it remains unclear whether the preprint exposure of prestigious authors to reviewers is correlated with review features. Here, we employed the linear regression model to examine this relationship. By collecting open peer review reports of 2,059 papers published in Nature Communications in 2019 within the fields of biological and health sciences, we found no obvious difference in review features when the identities of authors with different academic prestige are potentially exposed to reviewers. Specifically, no significant effect was observed on the number of questions raised and the sentiments of the review reports (positivity and subjectivity) in the first round of the peer review process. Moreover, we found no evidence that review features from anonymous reviewers were more positively or subjectively expressed than those with reviewers’ names publicly available. The results persisted even when assuming all papers were under single-blind peer review, which were validated by using the eLife data. This study indicates that papers with both prestigious and less well-known authors are treated equally during the open peer review process, which contributes to the ongoing discourse on the fairness of peer review within the scientific community.

Open peer reviewed case studies in science and technology journals

This paper provides reference for the implementation of open peer review (OPR) in Chinese scientific journals, so as to promote the openness of Chinese scientific journals in peer review and further conform to the spirit of scientific openness. The OPR process of PLoS One, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, F1000Research, the Semantic Web Journal, and Acta Psychologica Sinica was investigated. The five journals show many of the same OPR characteristics, but none of them implement OPR in the same way, which reflects the diversity of OPR practice process. Based on the actual situation, Chinese scientific journals should combine the advantages of open access and OPR with the advantages of traditional peer review flexibly and effectively, and optimize the implementation process of OPR.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS—A DISTRIBUTED SPECIAL ISSUE

In response to the challenges of privatization, austerity, and the complicity of higher education institutions in white supremacy and settler colonialism, how do we assess education’s past and present and look toward equitable futures? Taking up these questions, this distributed special issue will run in the critical dialogues section of Ethnic Studies Review, and will examine abolitionist pedagogy and student labor during the pandemic and beyond.Specifically, it invites contributors to explore and exchange ideas about how to build pedagogies, classrooms, and institutions grounded in radical traditions of feminist, queer, abolitionist, and decolonial world-making. A “distributed special issue,” as we envision it, departs from the traditional style and structure of a special issue, in which editors solicit and select essays published simultaneously as an issue. The essays will be published over the course of two years, so we envision that subsequent essays may respond to ones that follow ours. The purpose of this structure is to promote a dialogic approach to conversation at the intersections of ethnic studies praxis and pedagogical practice.To this end, we encourage contributions that offer experimental, collaborative, creative, and design-based materials including: collaborative writing, annotated syllabi, interviews and dialogues, assignments and assessments, or classroom exercises, in addition to more traditional pieces of argumentative prose or theoretical inquiry. Contributions may be responses to pieces already published in the distributed special issue or may take this call in new directions. To this end, please see the examples of our first two “models in process” within this issue; one from Roopika Risam and a second from Sabina Vaught, Damien Sojoyner, and Connie Wun. We especially welcome submissions from voices on the margins of the higher education system including graduate student instructors or TAs, precarious/adjunct faculty, independent scholars, university staff, librarians, digital specialists, workers, and K–12 educators.Examples of topics that contributors may wish to engage with include, but are not limited to the following:Submissions offering historical or theoretical analysis should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words in length. Creative or design-based submissions should include all relevant materials and be accompanied by a brief designer’s note (500–1,500 words) offering explanatory insight on their design and framing their use with detailed examples and/or instructions. To be considered, please send an abstract of 250 words (or an equivalent overview/representative sample for non-prose submissions) to abolitionist.ped@gmail.com.The distributed issue has a rolling deadline. Authors of accepted submissions will be requested to submit full papers by January 2023 and every three months thereafter.For other author instructions please consult the ESR Author Guidelines.Abstracts will be subject to editorial review by Steven Gotzler, Vineeta Singh, and Roopika Risam. Authors of submissions invited for full papers will have two options for peer review: an open peer review process (where author and reviewers are known to and in dialogue with each other) or a blind peer review process (run through ESR’s standard peer review process with UC Press). We encourage open peer review, but make the blind peer review option for those who prefer it.

Designing an Open Peer Review Process for Open Access Guides

Designing an Open Peer Review Process for Open Access Guides

New Media for Science: Key Features of Platforms with Open Peer Review

The article deals with open peer reviewing as a new way of verifying results of researches in the scientific sector of digital media. The technological modernization of scientific publishers provides for solving some of the problems of the traditional peer reviewing. This explains the topicality of the study. The authors analyzed ten platforms with open peer review that are based in Europe, the USA and Canada. According to the results, a formally similar open peer review process may vary depending on the scope of authority a scientific community has, reviewers’ identification, authors’ opportunities to propose an expert, the degree of review openness, posting the revised versions, and involvement of the editorial board if any. The tools that the platforms use to encourage the scientific community to participate in commenting and reviewing the publications also matter. One of the key advantages of open peer reviewing is reducing the time required for publishing an article, which is crucial for some scientific fields.

Development of an open peer review system using blockchain and reviewer recommendation technologies

In order to create a transparent and sound academic communication ecosystem centered on researchers, we developed a system that applied blockchain technology to an open peer review system. In this study, an open peer review system was developed based on Hyperledger Fabric, which is a private blockchain. The system can be operated in connection with the reviewer recommendation module of the existing submission management system. In the reviewer recommendation module, reviewers are recommended by excluding co-authors and colleagues after an expertise test. The blockchain system performs an open peer review process based on smart contracts, while the submission management system selects reviewers for peer review. A service broker intervenes between these two systems for data interchange. The system developed herein is expected to be used as a researcher-centered scholarly communication model in the open science era, in which the intervention of publishers is minimized, and authors and reviewers (as researchers) are centered.

Open up: a survey on open and non-anonymized peer reviewing

BackgroundOur aim is to highlight the benefits and limitations of open and non-anonymized peer review. Our argument is based on the literature and on responses to a survey on the reviewing process of alt.chi, a more or less open review track within the so-called Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference, the predominant conference in the field of human-computer interaction. This track currently is the only implementation of an open peer review process in the field of human-computer interaction while, with the recent increase in interest in open scientific practices, open review is now being considered and used in other fields.MethodsWe ran an online survey with 30 responses from alt.chi authors and reviewers, collecting quantitative data using multiple-choice questions and Likert scales. Qualitative data were collected using open questions.ResultsOur main quantitative result is that respondents are more positive to open and non-anonymous reviewing for alt.chi than for other parts of the CHI conference. The qualitative data specifically highlight the benefits of open and transparent academic discussions. The data and scripts are available on https://osf.io/vuw7h/, and the figures and follow-up work on http://tiny.cc/OpenReviews.ConclusionWhile the benefits are quite clear and the system is generally well-liked by alt.chi participants, they remain reluctant to see it used in other venues. This concurs with a number of recent studies that suggest a divergence between support for a more open review process and its practical implementation.

Evolving landscape of scholarly journals in open access environment

PurposeOpen access journals (OAJs) offer immediate, free and unrestricted online access to the scholarly literature. The purpose of this study is to trace the status and characteristics of OAJs published across the globe. Various trends that have evolved in OAJ market have been studied.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on data collected from one of the largest OA journal directory – Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The data were downloaded on 02 January 2018 and details of OAJs added to DOAJ till 31 December 2018 were harvested, codified and further analyzed in SPSS software. A Microsoft-Excel template application – MAKESENS – developed by Finnish Meteorological Institute (Finland) in 2002, was explored to perform Mann–Kendall Test and Sen’s Slope Estimates.FindingsA less score of OAJs offer access to their archival content. An increasing trend is witnessed in the OAJ publishing with Elsevier, Sciendo and BioMed Central (BMC) as the top publishers. Majority of publishers are from high-income zone countries, followed by upper-middle and lower-middle zone countries. Majority of OA publishers are from the UK, Indonesia and Brazil. A lesser score of journals offer article processing charges and/or author submission charges. Majority of OAJs from high- and lower-middle-income zone countries levy submission/processing charge to authors compared to OA journals from upper-middle- and lower-income zone countries (p < 0.01). OJS stays a prioritized platform for hosting OA journal content. Portico and CLOCKSS/LOCKSS are mostly used for long-term preservation purposes. Majority of OAJs from high-income zone countries participate in digital arching initiatives compared to ones from other income zones. Majority of the journals adopt a peer review (double-blind peer review, blind peer review, peer review and open peer review) process for validation of their scholarly content. The time lag between submission and publication ranges from one to 53 weeks, with majority of OAJs having a time lag of 11-20 weeks. Creative Commons Licenses are mainly adopted by OAJs.Research limitations/implicationsAs the study is based on the data offered by DOAJ, any gaps in the DOAJ data will also get reflected in the study. Further, there might be other OAJs also that have yet to show compliance with DOAJ standards and get indexed with it.Originality/valueThe study tries to showcase the current status and characteristics of OAJs.

Survey on open peer review: Attitudes and experience amongst editors, authors and reviewers.

Open peer review (OPR) is a cornerstone of the emergent Open Science agenda. Yet to date no large-scale survey of attitudes towards OPR amongst academic editors, authors, reviewers and publishers has been undertaken. This paper presents the findings of an online survey, conducted for the OpenAIRE2020 project during September and October 2016, that sought to bridge this information gap in order to aid the development of appropriate OPR approaches by providing evidence about attitudes towards and levels of experience with OPR. The results of this cross-disciplinary survey, which received 3,062 full responses, show the majority (60.3%) of respondents to be believe that OPR as a general concept should be mainstream scholarly practice (although attitudes to individual traits varied, and open identities peer review was not generally favoured). Respondents were also in favour of other areas of Open Science, like Open Access (88.2%) and Open Data (80.3%). Among respondents we observed high levels of experience with OPR, with three out of four (76.2%) reporting having taken part in an OPR process as author, reviewer or editor. There were also high levels of support for most of the traits of OPR, particularly open interaction, open reports and final-version commenting. Respondents were against opening reviewer identities to authors, however, with more than half believing it would make peer review worse. Overall satisfaction with the peer review system used by scholarly journals seems to strongly vary across disciplines. Taken together, these findings are very encouraging for OPR’s prospects for moving mainstream but indicate that due care must be taken to avoid a “one-size fits all” solution and to tailor such systems to differing (especially disciplinary) contexts. OPR is an evolving phenomenon and hence future studies are to be encouraged, especially to further explore differences between disciplines and monitor the evolution of attitudes.

Open Peer Review in Scientific Publishing: A Web Mining Study of PeerJ Authors and Reviewers

Abstract Purpose To understand how authors and reviewers are accepting and embracing Open Peer Review (OPR), one of the newest innovations in the Open Science movement. Design/methodology/approach This research collected and analyzed data from the Open Access journal PeerJ over its first three years (2013–2016). Web data were scraped, cleaned, and structured using several Web tools and programs. The structured data were imported into a relational database. Data analyses were conducted using analytical tools as well as programs developed by the researchers. Findings PeerJ, which supports optional OPR, has a broad international representation of authors and referees. Approximately 73.89% of articles provide full review histories. Of the articles with published review histories, 17.61% had identities of all reviewers and 52.57% had at least one signed reviewer. In total, 43.23% of all reviews were signed. The observed proportions of signed reviews have been relatively stable over the period since the Journal’s inception. Research limitations This research is constrained by the availability of the peer review history data. Some peer reviews were not available when the authors opted out of publishing their review histories. The anonymity of reviewers made it impossible to give an accurate count of reviewers who contributed to the review process. Practical implications These findings shed light on the current characteristics of OPR. Given the policy that authors are encouraged to make their articles’ review history public and referees are encouraged to sign their review reports, the three years of PeerJ review data demonstrate that there is still some reluctance by authors to make their reviews public and by reviewers to identify themselves. Originality/value This is the first study to closely examine PeerJ as an example of an OPR model journal. As Open Science moves further towards open research, OPR is a final and critical component. Research in this area must identify the best policies and paths towards a transparent and open peer review process for scientific communication.

RETRACTION: How blockchain-timestamped protocols could improve the trustworthiness of medical science.

[This retracts the article DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.8114.1.][This retracts the article DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.8114.2.][This retracts the article DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.8114.3.].

A primeira década de divulgação científica da revista PARC

A revista PARC Pesquisa em Arquitetura e Construção completa, em 2016, dez anos de existência. A terceira edição de 2016 é portanto uma edição comemorativa. É apresentado uma síntese das realizações da revista nesta década. Além deste relato são publicados seis artigos, entre estes quatro são artigos convidados que passaram por um processo de revisão aberta por pares. Os editores da revista reafirmamos o empenho “em contribuir para ampliar o repertório teórico e científico capaz de auxiliar engenheiros civis, arquitetos e urbanistas em suas atuações profissionais ou acadêmicas” lançado em 2006 pelos fundadores da PARC.

Ways to Open Science. Open Research Infrastructures and the role of repositories

Watch the VIDEO of the presentation.The Way to Open Science contains many components. One of these components would be open repositories based on open source software with free access to researchers. Open access policies are essential, as are open infrastructures and open contents. Repositories can support this openness by offering open licenses, open metadata , the possibility to use open formats and open thesauri. Another principal point is transparency. Open peer review should be possible, and the description of processes should also be transparent. Of course, an open license should provide all data types and metadata as well.It is important to help researchers to make their results visible and accessible and to encourage them to publish in OA-Journals and use repositories for the underlying data. Open Access Policies are supporting these efforts. Open data can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose. In order to do so, Open Licenses are required.Also Metadata are important components of the Way to Open Science. Metadata are data about data which should be free of all restrictions on access, structured and based on standards.Open formats are defined by a published specification and are not restricted in their use. They are mainly used by open-source software. Open Thesauruses are freely accessible for everyone without costs and with a free license.Open Processes should be documented, transparent, repeatable and reusable.An open peer review process is also a step forward to Open Science. Authors and referees are no longer anonymous. The whole process and the decision letters are open.Of course Open licenses allow the reuse of any work or data without any restrictions.The lecture will deal with various aspects of open science and focus on the role of repositories – with all chances and challenges.

Checklist for Early Recognition and Treatment of Acute Illness (CERTAIN): evolution of a content management system for point-of-care clinical decision support.

BackgroundThe Checklist for Early Recognition and Treatment of Acute Illness (CERTAIN) is an international collaborative project with the overall objective of standardizing the approach to the evaluation and treatment of critically ill patients world-wide, in accordance with best-practice principles. One of CERTAIN’s key features is clinical decision support providing point-of-care information about common acute illness syndromes, procedures, and medications in an index card format.MethodsThis paper describes 1) the process of developing and validating the content for point-of-care decision support, and 2) the content management system that facilitates frequent peer-review and allows rapid updates of content across different platforms (CERTAIN software, mobile apps, pdf-booklet) and different languages.ResultsContent was created based on survey results of acute care providers and validated using an open peer-review process. Over a 3 year period, CERTAIN content expanded to include 67 syndrome cards, 30 procedure cards, and 117 medication cards. 127 (59 %) cards have been peer-reviewed so far. Initially MS Word® and Dropbox® were used to create, store, and share content for peer-review. Recently Google Docs® was used to make the peer-review process more efficient. However, neither of these approaches met our security requirements nor has the capacity to instantly update the different CERTAIN platforms.ConclusionAlthough we were able to successfully develop and validate a large inventory of clinical decision support cards in a short period of time, commercially available software solutions for content management are suboptimal. Novel custom solutions are necessary for efficient global point of care content system management.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12911-016-0367-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The ELIXIR channel in F1000Research.

ELIXIR, the European life science infrastructure for biological information, is a unique initiative to consolidate Europe’s national centres, services, and core bioinformatics resources into a single, coordinated infrastructure. ELIXIR brings together Europe’s major life-science data archives and connects these with national bioinformatics infrastructures - the ELIXIR Nodes. This editorial introduces the ELIXIR channel in F1000Research; the aim of the channel is to collect and present ELIXIR’s scientific and operational output, engage with the broad life science community and encourage discussion on proposed infrastructure solutions. Submissions will be assessed by the ELIXIR channel Advisory Board to ensure they are relevant to ELIXIR community, and subjected to F1000Research open peer review process.

Proposals for the Writing of Peer Reviews in Lexicography

&lt;p&gt;In lexicography a good review is important for the dictionary maker(s), the publishing house and the whole lexicographical community. It is also important for the reviewers because it can expand their research record. Up to a few years ago reviews were still acknowledged in research databases. Currently they can be included in a database, but they do not count as scientific outputs. The situation for peer reviews is similar. Peer reviews are an important quality assurance tool in the scientific publication process. Good peer reviews have some mutual characteristics with reviews, especially regarding ethical aspects. But there are essential differences. These issues are discussed in this paper and some methodological and ethical proposals for peer reviews are made. One of the proposals could create a debate because it argues for an open peer review process and not for the so-called double blind peer review. Another proposal focuses on the role of the editor and his ability to decide if a peer review should be rejected and not be forwarded to the author.&lt;/p&gt;

The ELIXIR channel in F1000Research

ELIXIR, the European life science infrastructure for biological information, is a unique initiative to consolidate Europe's national centres, services, and core bioinformatics resources into a single, coordinated infrastructure. ELIXIR brings together Europe's major life-science data archives and connects these with national bioinformatics infrastructures - the ELIXIR Nodes. This editorial introduces the ELIXIR channel in F1000Research; the aim of the channel is to collect and present ELIXIR's scientific and operational output, engage with the broad life science community and encourage discussion on proposed infrastructure solutions. Submissions will be assessed by the ELIXIR channel Editorial Board to ensure they are relevant to ELIXIR community, and subjected to F1000Research open peer review process.

Topics of major current interest in scholarly editing and publishing based on the content analysis of selected journals

For the purpose of obtaining a concrete picture of the main issues related to modern scholarly editing and publishing, a content analysis of the recent issues of three international journals devoted to scholarly editing and publishing, which are Learned Publishing, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, and European Science Editing, has been performed. The main topics in each of the 273 articles published in those journals over recent three years have been identified and classified into broad categories. The result has shown that the two most popular topics are open access publishing and peer review process. Other non-traditional topics currently receiving a great attention include bibliometrics, publication ethics, information technology applicable to editing and publishing, digital publishing, and literature databases. In order to keep up with the rapidly-developing field of scholarly editing and publishing and develop a local journal into an international journal of a high standard, it is important to remain keen to the latest development related to these topics.

Open Peer Review: A New Challenge for Cosmetics

Dear Readers, As part of a continued effort to improve the quality of our papers and the transparency of the publication process, Cosmetics will introduce in the near future the possibility for the Authors to choose an Open Peer Review process (OPR). OPR is as a process in which the names of the authors and reviewers may be known to each other, and where review reports are published alongside the final manuscript, with the aim to facilitate discussion and clarity between the authors and the reviewer(s).

Revisiting Linus’s law: Benefits and challenges of open source software peer review

Open source projects leverage a large number of people to review products and improve code quality. Differences among participants are inevitable and important to this collaborative review process—participants with different expertise, experience, resources, and values approach the problems differently, increasing the likelihood of finding more bugs and fixing the particularly difficult ones. To understand the impacts of member differences on the open source software peer review process, we examined bug reports of Mozilla Firefox. These analyses show that the various types of member differences increase workload as well as frustration and conflicts. However, they facilitate situated learning, problem characterization, design review, and boundary spanning. We discuss implications for work performance and community engagement, and suggest several ways to leverage member differences in the open source software peer review process.