Archives des mots-clés : Peer Review

Open Science and peer-review in the humanities

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“The purpose of this paper is to consider alternatives to the traditional system of peer review. I will argue that new methods of review should be more in accordance with the principles of Open Science. Current modes of carrying out peer review are functioning as barriers against more transparent ways of doing research. I will focus on peer reviewing as it is done in the humanities. These sciences seem to be clinging particularly tight to traditional ways of publishing and doing peer review. After looking at traditional peer review and the troubles related to it, I will discuss alternative ways of reviewing scholarly material. The anonymity of reviewers and authors, the appropriate time to make papers public, and how to reward reviewers are topics that are of importance in this context.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/24136/

Exposing the predators. Methods to stop predatory journals

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“The internet is greatly improving the impact of scholarly journals, but also poses new threats to their quality. Publishers have arisen that abuse the Gold Open Access model, in which the author pays a fee to get his article published, to make money with so-called predatory journals. These publishers falsely claim to conduct peer review, which makes them more prone to publish fraudulent and plagiarised research. This thesis looks at three possible methods to stop predatory journals: black- and white-lists, open peer review systems and new metrics. Black- and whitelists have set up rules and regulations that credible publishers and journals should follow. Open peer review systems should make it harder for predatory publishers to make false claims about their peer review process. Metrics should measure more aspects of research impact and become less liable to gaming. The question is, which of these three methods is the best candidate to stop predatory journals. As all three methods have their drawbacks, especially for new but high quality journals, none of them stop predatory journals on its own can. Rather, we need a system in which researchers, publishers and reviewers communicate more openly about the research they create, disseminate and read. But above all, we need to find a way to take away incentives for researchers and publishers to engage in fraudulent practices.”

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/1887/28943

Why Do We Still Have Journals?

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“The Web has greatly reduced the barriers to entry for new journals and other platforms for communicating scientific output, and the number of journals continues to multiply. This leaves readers and authors with the daunting cognitive challenge of navigating the literature and discerning contributions that are both relevant and significant. Meanwhile, measures of journal impact that might guide the use of the literature have become more visible and consequential, leading to “impact gamesmanship” that renders the measures increasingly suspect. The incentive system created by our journals is broken. In this essay, I argue that the core technology of journals is not their distribution but their review process. The organization of the review process reflects assumptions about what a contribution is and how it should be evaluated. Through their review processes, journals can certify contributions, convene scholarly communities, and curate works that are worth reading. Different review processes thereby create incentives for different kinds of work. It’s time for a broader dialogue about how we connect the aims of the social science enterprise to our system of journals.”

URL : http://asq.sagepub.com/content/59/2/193.full

L’Avenir du contrôle par les pairs dans la…

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L’Avenir du contrôle par les pairs dans la publication scientifique face au défis du libre accès :

“Le sujet de notre thèse “L’Avenir du contrôle par les pairs dans la publication scientifique face aux défis du libre accès” aborde la problématique du contrôle par les pairs à l’ère d’Internet. Composé de trois parties (Brève histoire de la communication humaine, Evolution et outils du libre accès et Contrôle par les pairs et libre accès), il retrace l’évolution de la communication humaine associée à une étape primordiale et indispensable de la Science : le contrôle par les pairs. Il essaye de répondre à la question de son devenir et orientation dans un monde en changement constant ainsi qu’au devenir de la publication de la science et de la construction science elle-même dans un monde de plus en plus ouvert et rapide.”

“The subject of our thesis “The future of peer review in the scholarly publication and the challenge of open access ” pertains to the subject of peer review in the Internet age .Made up of three distincts parts (“Short history of human communication , Evolution and open access tools , Peer review and open access ) it relates the human communication associated to an important and unavoidable stage of Science : peer review .it tries to answer the question of its future and orientation in a world in a perpetual change and also the future of science publication and its construction in a more and more rapid and open world.”

URL : http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00922600

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing

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“Peer review is an important element of scientific communication but deserves quantitative examination. We used data from the handling service manuscript Central for ten mid-tier ecology and evolution journals to test whether number of external reviews completed improved citation rates for all accepted manuscripts. Contrary to a previous study examining this issue using resubmission data as a proxy for reviews, we show that citation rates of manuscripts do not correlate with the number of individuals that provided reviews. Importantly, externally-reviewed papers do not outperform editor-only reviewed published papers in terms of visibility within a 5-year citation window. These findings suggest that in many instances editors can be all that is needed to review papers (or at least conduct the critical first review to assess general suitability) if the purpose of peer review is to primarily filter and that journals can consider reducing the number of referees associated with reviewing ecology and evolution papers.”

URL : With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: the Importance of Rejection, Power, and Editors in the Practice of Scientific Publishing

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0085382

How important tasks are performed peer review …

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How important tasks are performed: peer review :

“The advancement of various fields of science depends on the actions of individual scientists via the peer review process. The referees’ work patterns and stochastic nature of decision making both relate to the particular features of refereeing and to the universal aspects of human behavior. Here, we show that the time a referee takes to write a report on a scientific manuscript depends on the final verdict. The data is compared to a model, where the review takes place in an ongoing competition of completing an important composite task with a large number of concurrent ones – a Deadline -effect. In peer review human decision making and task completion combine both long-range predictability and stochastic variation due to a large degree of ever-changing external “friction”.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.4963