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

Modeling peer review an agent based approach …

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Modeling peer review: an agent-based approach :

“The peer review system is under severe strain. Corrections have been proposed, but experiments to determine effective measures are difficult to perform. I propose a framework in which alternatives to the current peer review system can be studied quantitatively using agent-based modeling. I implement three possible systems. I show how, all other things being equal, these alternatives produce different results in terms of speed of publication, quality control, reviewers’ effort, and authors’ impact. This modeling framework can be used to test other solutions for peer review, leading the way to an improvement of how science is disseminated.”

URL : http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/IEE/article/view/4447

Peer-Reviewed Open Research Data: Results of a Pilot

Peer review of publications is at the core of science and primarily seen as instrument for ensuring research quality. However, it is less common to independently value the quality of the underlying data as well.

In the light of the ‘data deluge’ it makes sense to extend peer review to the data itself and this way evaluate the degree to which the data are fit for re-use. This paper describes a pilot study at EASY – the electronic archive for (open) research data at our institution.

In EASY, researchers can archive their data and add metadata themselves. Devoted to open access and data sharing, at the archive we are interested in further enriching these metadata with peer reviews.

As a pilot, we established a workflow where researchers who have downloaded data sets from the archive were asked to review the downloaded data set. This paper describes the details of the pilot including the findings, both quantitative and qualitative.

Finally, we discuss issues that need to be solved when such a pilot is turned into a structural peer review functionality for the archiving system.

URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/231

Open evaluation a vision for entirely transparent post…

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Open evaluation: a vision for entirely transparent post-publication peer review and rating for science :

“The two major functions of a scientific publishing system are to provide access to and evaluation of scientific papers. While open access (OA) is becoming a reality, open evaluation (OE), the other side of the coin, has received less attention. Evaluation steers the attention of the scientific community and thus the very course of science. It also influences the use of scientific findings in public policy. The current system of scientific publishing provides only journal prestige as an indication of the quality of new papers and relies on a non-transparent and noisy pre-publication peer-review process, which delays publication by many months on average. Here I propose an OE system, in which papers are evaluated post-publication in an ongoing fashion by means of open peer review and rating. Through signed ratings and reviews, scientists steer the attention of their field and build their reputation. Reviewers are motivated to be objective, because low-quality or self-serving signed evaluations will negatively impact their reputation. A core feature of this proposal is a division of powers between the accumulation of evaluative evidence and the analysis of this evidence by paper evaluation functions (PEFs). PEFs can be freely defined by individuals or groups (e.g., scientific societies) and provide a plurality of perspectives on the scientific literature. Simple PEFs will use averages of ratings, weighting reviewers (e.g., by H-index), and rating scales (e.g., by relevance to a decision process) in different ways. Complex PEFs will use advanced statistical techniques to infer the quality of a paper. Papers with initially promising ratings will be more deeply evaluated. The continual refinement of PEFs in response to attempts by individuals to influence evaluations in their own favor will make the system ungameable. OA and OE together have the power to revolutionize scientific publishing and usher in a new culture of transparency, constructive criticism, and collaboration.”

URL : http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2012.00079/full