The purpose of peer review is often portrayed as being a simple ‘objective’ test of the soundness or quality of a research paper. However, it also performs other functions primarily through linking and developing relationships between networks of researchers. In this post, Flaminio Squazzoni explores these interconnections and argues that to understand peer review as simply an exercise in quality control is to be blind to the historical, political and social dimensions of peer review. … Read More →
A look at peer review of grant proposals
The scholarly peer review tracking platform Publons has launched the Grant Review in Focus on project assessment and identification for funding. Four thousand and seven hundred researchers were interviewed as well as data extracted from Web of Science. … Read More →
Tropical Medicine/Infectious and Parasitic Diseases journals align with open science editorial practices
Three of the most important journals in the areas of Tropical Medicine/Infectious and Parasitic Diseases of the SciELO Brazil Collection decided to adopt open science practices to provide more transparency, increase sharing and open access to the research results they report. This is the first of a series of novel pilot projects promoted by SciELO to inform editorial policies as well as to enable the management and operation of journals in the appropriation of and interoperability with preprints, research data and other content underlying the article texts for subsequent progressive opening of the peer review process. … Read More →
How to write an academic review? [Originally published in DADOS’ blog in July/2019]
The purpose of this post is to outline what a reviewer should consider before writing an assessment. In it, we discuss issues such as the importance of writing reviews, the types of possible reviews, what to do when detecting a conflict of interest, etc. … Read More →
Potential advantages and disadvantages in the publication of reviews
Publishing peer reviews is a growing trend in scholarly communication, for the sake of transparency and as a practice associated to open science. There are, however, advantages and disadvantages that should be considered by journal editors when adopting this peer review modality. … Read More →
Open peer review: Publishing peer review reports influences referee behavior?
A pilot study was conducted with five Elsevier journals in different areas of knowledge on the effects of publishing peer review reports of 9,220 articles submitted between 2010 and 2017. The main findings of the study suggest that the publication of reviews does not influence or compromise the peer review work. The authors were unable to detect any significant effect on the readiness to perform the evaluation, content and outcome of the recommendations, nor on the time taken to perform the evaluation. However, only 8.1% of the referees agreed to disclose their identity as authors of the review reports. … Read More →
From star peer reviewers to ghost peer reviewers – Part II
Open reviews and the emergence of platforms such as Publons, which publish these activities and integrate them into other academic tasks, open the possibility of the emergence of a new aspect of bibliometrics and certainly a new and prestigious market. … Read More →
From star peer reviewers to ghost peer reviewers – Part I
Peer review is an integral part of scholarly publishing and is carried out globally by most researchers in developed countries. To what extent researchers from emerging countries participate and which measures of their performance are reported in the result of the largest survey on peer review conducted so far. This note is the first of two on the subject. … Read More →
Scientific Publishing Innovations: the Future of Journals and Peer Review
On the first day of SciELO 20 Years Week, during the WG5 – Scientific Publishing Innovations and the Future of Peer Review and Journals, new methodologies for opening the publishing process using preprints servers were discussed throughout the day before an audience of more than 50 people and presentations of six experts. Text available only in Spanish. … Read More →
Challenges in peer review of scientific articles on Administration in Brazil
Sharing their experiences as authors, reviewers and editors of scientific journals, Sandro Cabral and Marcelo de Souza Bispo reflect on the challenges of the article evaluation process, criticize the current system that favors productivism, overloading the reviewers, and draws attention on the need to train good reviewers in PhD courses in Brazil. … Read More →
What do Spanish researchers think about Open Peer Review?
In February 2018, the Spanish Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas launched a survey to know the habits, preferences and opinions of its researchers when performing an evaluation and being subjected to open peer review, with the aim of contributing to the international debate on science assessment and possible ways of improvement. Fifty-four percent of respondents are satisfied with the dominant peer review system and fifty percent agree to open the reviewers’ identity as it helps reduce conflicts of interest. … Read More →
What does a new approach mean (for journals, research councils)?
Preprints are a development underway in science communication and publishing. For journals, this has consequences. They may adopt a passive role, an opposing stance, or an encouraging, stimulating role, and see it as an opportunity, placing their journal in the midst of the preprint development. These are issues to be discussed in detail at the SciELO 20 Years Conference in September 2018. … Read More →
eLife tests out an innovative approach in peer review
The journal eLife is conducting an innovative experiment by accepting all articles sent to peer review after initial screening. To test the feasibility of an even more participative peer review process, authors will be able to control the decision whether to publish (or not) their articles and how they will respond to reviewers’ comments. By breaking with the paradigms of the author-editor-reviewer relationship, eLife aims to promote a constructive dialogue between the parties and reduce the burden of the journals’ prestige in research evaluation. … Read More →
Peer review – on structures and content
Peer review is a constituent part of scholarly communication. It has many modalities: simple blind, double blind, open, and now, also partial reviews. Partial reviews, which only validates the technical soundness of a document, is a feature of open access mega-journals such as PLoS ONE and several others. … Read More →
Communication and peer review should be universally separated
The SciELO 20 Years Week will promote an ample and open forum on the future of scientific communication and journals. There is a discussion group for each topic of the SciELO 20 Years Conference. The discussion starts with this comment by Jan Velterop on the separation between communication and peer review posted in the discussion group of the Panel 3.1 that deals with fast communication via preprints and other means to accelerate the availability of research results. … Read More →
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