Problematizing Peer Review: Academic Librarians’ Pedagogical Approaches to Peer Review

Authors : Lana Mariko Wood, Gr Keer

INTRODUCTION

This study is the first to consider how academic librarians’ understanding of and participation in the peer review process influences their information literacy pedagogy and practice.

METHODS

This mixed-methods study uses a modified sequential explanatory design, beginning with a survey of academic librarians in the United States and Canada, followed by interviews with interested study participants.

RESULTS & DISCUSSION

The researchers find that academic librarians frequently teach about peer review, but approaches vary widely, and though some have adapted the Framework to fit their instruction about peer review, there are no best practices.

Instructor demands, the length of instructional sessions, and student level influence whether and how academic librarians contextualize the peer review process. While some academic librarians draw from their personal experience in the peer review process as authors, reviewers, and/or editors in their teaching, academic librarians do not consistently report their personal experience as an influence on their teaching of the peer review process to students.

CONCLUSION

This article argues that academic librarians should consider the place of peer review in information literacy instruction, including interrogating how scaffolding instruction about peer review may provide a disservice to students from an equity perspective.

The authors urge academic librarians who have it to draw on personal experience to contextualize their instruction about peer review.

URL : Problematizing Peer Review: Academic Librarians’ Pedagogical Approaches to Peer Review

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2399

Modes d’évaluation ouverte par les pairs : de la revue à la plateforme

Auteurs/Authors : Evelyne Broudoux, Madjid Ihadjadene

Cet article a pour but de proposer un état de l’art des différentes formes de l’évaluation d’articles ou de communications par les pairs. De l’évaluation « aveugle» à l’évaluation « ouverte », de multiples possibilités existent et sont expérimentées.

C’est dans le champ des sciences que l’on trouve le plus d’innovations sociotechniques s’appuyant sur des plateformes de publication modélisant des workflows éditoriaux originaux.

L’ouverture de l’évaluation peut se produire entre pairs, en rendant publiques les identités et/ou les rapports des évaluateurs, à différents stades de l’article scientifique : préprint, en cours de rédaction, ou encore après publication.

Cet état de l’art est basé sur un ensemble de publications essentiellement produites par les acteurs de l’évaluation ouverte, issus principalement des disciplines STM.

URL : Modes d’évaluation ouverte par les pairs : de la revue à la plateforme

URL : https://revue-cossi.numerev.com/articles/revue-9/2496-modes-d-evaluation-ouverte-par-les-pairs-de-la-revue-a-la-plateforme

What Have We Learned from OpenReview?

Authors : Gang Wang, Qi Peng, Yanfeng Zhang, Mingyang Zhang

Anonymous peer review is used by the great majority of computer science conferences. OpenReview is such a platform that aims to promote openness in peer review process. The paper, (meta) reviews, rebuttals, and final decisions are all released to public. We collect 5,527 submissions and their 16,853 reviews from the OpenReview platform.

We also collect these submissions’ citation data from Google Scholar and their non-peer-reviewed versions from arXiv.org. By acquiring deep insights into these data, we have several interesting findings that could help understand the effectiveness of the public-accessible double-blind peer review process.

Our results can potentially help writing a paper, reviewing it, and deciding on its acceptance.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05885v4

The Pioneering Role of Sci in Post Publication Public Peer Review (P4R)

Authors : Ahmad Yaman Abdin, Muhammad Jawad Nasim, Yannick Ney, Claus Jacob

Scientists observe, discover, justify and eventually share their findings with the scientific community. Dissemination is an integral aspect of scientific discovery, since discoveries which go unnoticed have no or little impact on science.

Today, peer review is part of this process of scientific dissemination as it contributes proactively to the quality of a scientific article. As the numbers of scientific journals and scientific articles published therein are increasing steadily, processes such as the single-blind or double-blind peer review are facing a near collapse situation.

In fact, these traditional forms of reviewing have reached their limits and, because of this, are also increasingly considered as unfair, sloppy, superficial and even biased. In this manuscript, we propose forms of post-publication public peer review (P4R) as valuable alternatives to the traditional blind peer review system.

We describe how the journal Sci has explored such an approach and provide first empirical evidence of the benefits and also challenges, such a P4R approach faces.

URL : The Pioneering Role of Sci in Post Publication Public Peer Review (P4R)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9010013

A Billion Dollar Donation: The Cost, and Inefficiency of, Researchers’ Time Spent on Peer Review

Authors : Balazs Aczel, Barnabas Szaszi, Alex Holcombe

Background

The amount and value of researchers’ peer review work is critical for academia and publishing. However, it is rarely recognized, its magnitude is unknown, and alternative ways of organizing peer review labor are rarely considered.

Methods

In this paper, we provide an estimate of researchers’ time and the salary-based contribution to the peer-review system, using publicly available data.

Results

We found that the total time reviewers globally worked on peer reviews was over 100 million hours in 2019, equivalent to over 12 thousand years. The estimated monetary value of the time US-based reviewers spent on reviews was over 1.1 billion USD in 2019. For China-based reviewers, the estimate is over 600 million USD, and for UK-based, over 200 million USD.

Conclusions

While these results are only rough estimates, they highlight the enormous amount of work and time that researchers provide to the publication system, and the importance of considering alternative ways of structuring, and paying for, peer review. We foster this process by discussing some alternative models that aim to improve the return on investment of scholarly publishing.

URL : A Billion Dollar Donation: The Cost, and Inefficiency of, Researchers’ Time Spent on Peer Review

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/5h9z4

Ants-Review: A Privacy-Oriented Protocol for Incentivized Open Peer Reviews on Ethereum

Authors  : Bianca Trovò, Nazzareno Massari

Peer review is a necessary and essential quality control step for scientific publications but lacks proper incentives. Indeed, the process, which is very costly in terms of time and intellectual investment, not only is not remunerated by the journals but it is also not openly recognized by the academic community as a relevant scientific output for a researcher.

Therefore, scientific dissemination is affected in timeliness, quality and fairness. Here, to solve this issue, we propose a blockchain-based incentive system that rewards scientists for peer reviewing other scientists’ work and that builds up trust and reputation.

We designed a privacy-oriented protocol of smart contracts called Ants-Review that allows authors to issue a bounty for open anonymous peer reviews on Ethereum.

If requirements are met, peer reviews will be accepted and paid by the approver proportionally to their assessed quality. To promote ethical behaviour and inclusiveness the system implements a gamified mechanism that allows the whole community to evaluate the peer reviews and vote for the best ones.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71593-9_2

Journal policies and editors’ opinions on peer review

Authors : Daniel G Hamilton, Hannah Fraser, Rink Hoekstra, Fiona Fidler

Peer review practices differ substantially between journals and disciplines. This study presents the results of a survey of 322 editors of journals in ecology, economics, medicine, physics and psychology.

We found that 49% of the journals surveyed checked all manuscripts for plagiarism, that 61% allowed authors to recommend both for and against specific reviewers, and that less than 6% used a form of open peer review.

Most journals did not have an official policy on altering reports from reviewers, but 91% of editors identified at least one situation in which it was appropriate for an editor to alter a report. Editors were also asked for their views on five issues related to publication ethics.

A majority expressed support for co-reviewing, reviewers requesting access to data, reviewers recommending citations to their work, editors publishing in their own journals, and replication studies.

Our results provide a window into what is largely an opaque aspect of the scientific process. We hope the findings will inform the debate about the role and transparency of peer review in scholarly publishing.

URL : Journal policies and editors’ opinions on peer review

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.62529