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open access and peer review July 24, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : open access , trackback

So, for the big project, I’ve been thinking a bit about online publishing and peer review. I’m an outsider here; the closest I’ve ever come to peer review is having classmates look at work or looking at their work.

So, I’m more than happy to take input from those who do or are ’subjected to’ peer review, and am hoping for any glaring and amateur errors to be pointed out.

One of the things I’ve thought about is the fact that peer review is essentially unrewarded. It’s part and parcel of the job of doing active research, but in the end, an individual is not rewarded for doing it, let alone rewarded for doing it well. In short, there’s no real incentive for being a good peer-reviewer. There’s also the difficulties connected with submitting work and having it reviewed, as the process is (as I understand it) dependent on the editor(s) of the journal concerned: will the editor pick good reviewers? Will they want to do it? Will their reviews be timely? And so on.

And then there’s the aspect of the journals themselves: sure, there’s the OA aspect of them charging large sums for publishing scientific work — but there’s also the “branding aspect“. Does Nature only publish ‘important’ papers, or do papers published in Nature become more important simply by virtue of being in that journal?

Open Access can have a huge impact on this — and not just on disseminating research to those interested on a much broader level. Not only on reducing the huge fees and thus increasing the limited availability of research to libraries. Not only can sites like PLoS, PubMed, DoAR, DoAJ, and all the others put more research out more quickly to more people.

They could change peer review, as well. PLoS ONE has taken a big first step with the ability to rate papers. What about making peer review itself a more transparent, online, open access process? Looking at sites like Wikipedia and EBay, I hit upon the idea, which I readily admit is still very underdeveloped, of having peer review take place in an entirely different manner. Rating papers is, as I said, a big first step. And perhaps the community (which, again, I’m not really a part of) isn’t ready to leap headfirst into something like what I’m thinking about.

But it’s still interesting, to me, to think about having peer review occur online, with feedback. Anonymity can be preserved, the ability to post reviews should be (obviously) more restricted than Wikipedia’s no holds barred approach, but the concept of a ‘talk page‘ or something similar coupled with a feedback system could, in my mind, do two things:

1. Enable peer review to become faster, with more input in the form of a dialogue

2. Enable a system which can provide feedback and recognition of the reviewer — an incentive and a reward for what is at this point an absolutely integral but also mostly unrewarded part of research publication.

This is a preliminary post, a sort of collecting-of-thoughts. Any ideas? I’m more than happy to have some peer review going on here.

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