New frontiers of peer review

This news article introduces a new COST Action entitled PEERE (TD1306), which stands for New Frontiers of Peer Review (PEERE). PEERE is a trans-domain proposal which brings together researchers from various different disciplines and science stake-holders for the purpose of reviewing the process of peer review. PEERE officially began in May 2014 and will end in May 2018. Thirty-one countries, including Malta, are currently participating in the Action. In order to set the context in which this COST Action was initiated, we first look very briefly at the history of the process of peer review and various models of peer review currently in use. We then share what this COST Action hopes to achieve.peer-reviewe

Peer Review system: A Golden standard for publications process

Peer review process helps in evaluating and validating of research that is published in the journals. U.S. Office of Research Integrity reported that data fraudulence was found to be involved in 94% cases of misconduct from 228 identified articles between 1994–2012. If fraud in published article are significantly as high as reported, the question arise in mind, were these articles peer reviewed? Another report said that the reviewers failed to detect 16 cases of fabricated article of Jan Hendrick Schon. Superficial peer reviewing process does not reveals suspicion of misconduct. Lack of knowledge of systemic review process not only demolish the academic integrity in publication but also loss the trust of the people of the institution, the nation, and the world. The aim of this review article is to aware stakeholders specially novice reviewers about the peer review system. Beginners will understand how to review an article and they can justify better action choices in dealing with reviewing an article

The Convergence of Digital-Libraries and the Peer-Review Process

Pre-print repositories have seen a significant increase in use over the past fifteen years across multiple research domains. Researchers are beginning to develop applications capable of using these repositories to assist the scientific community above and beyond the pure dissemination of information. The contribution set forth by this paper emphasizes a deconstructed publication model in which the peer-review process is mediated by an OAI-PMH peer-review service. This peer-review service uses a social-network algorithm to determine potential reviewers for a submitted manuscript and for weighting the relative influence of each participating reviewer's evaluations. This paper also suggests a set of peer-review specific metadata tags that can accompany a pre-print's existing metadata record. The combinations of these contributions provide a unique repository-centric peer-review model that fits within the widely deployed OAI-PMH framework.Comment: Journal of Information Science [in press

Recognition and reward system for peer-reviewers

Peer reviewing plays an important role in the academic publishing process that scrutinizes and provides feedback on the scientific work prior to publication. Peer-reviewers put their efforts in reviewing others research work voluntarily, without any expectations of incentives or rewards. The peer-review process has been criticized for its defects like slowness, bias and abuse of the process. In this paper, we present a model to address these issues by using the approach of recording peer-review data on the blockchain. By using the semantic web and linked data technologies, this system would be able to expose its data and interact with other systems. This system will be used to quantify, recognize and incentivize the peer-reviewing efforts by researchers

Grey literature review code

It is often assumed that grey literature is not peer reviewed or lacks standards of quality and rigour. While this is often incorrect, there is currently no standard way of indicating the kind of review process that has occurred. There are also alternative methods to peer review that are often used to scrutinise grey literature such as review by an expert panel or board, internal review and post publication review. This set of Review Codes are suggested as a simple way of indicating to readers that a review process that has been undertaken and what that has entailed. In order to use the Review Code 1. Select the code that is applicable from the list. 2. Add it to the bibliographic information on your document or resource 3. Include a brief explanation of the review process either within the resource or on a separate page with a link provided.   Review Codes Independent peer review Pre-publication peer-review conducted with 1 or more independent experts (academics or recognised experts in the field)   Expert panel review Pre-publication peer-review conducted via expert panel or board which may or may not include members outside of the organisation   Internal review Pre-publication review conducted internally or with external service including proof reading and editing, fact checking and confirmation of results   Other review process Some kind of pre-publication review process conducted that does not fit into any of the above.   Post publication peer review Material able to be reviewed publically on post  publication review website   --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is an initial concept and feedback is welcome. We are also considering developing some icons that could be used to simplify recognition of the different Review Codes. Produced as part of the Grey Literature Strategies ARC Linkage project       &nbsp

Peer review for the evaluation of the academic research: the Italian experience

Peer review, that is the evaluation process based on judgments formulated by independent experts, is generally used for different goals: the allocation of research funding, the review of the research results submitted for publication in scientific journals, and the assessment of the quality of research conducted by Universities and university-related Institutes. The paper deals with the latter type of peer review. The aim is to understand how the characteristics of the Italian experience provide useful lessons for improving peer review effectiveness for evaluating the academic research. More specifically, the paper investigates the peer review process developed within the Three-Year Research Assessment Exercise (VTR) in Italy. Our analysis covers four disciplinary sectors: chemistry, biology, humanities and economics. Thus, the choice includes two “hard science” sectors, which have similar type of research output submitted for the three-year evaluation process, and two sectors with different types of output. The results provide evidences, which highlight the important role played by peer review for judging the quality of the academic research in different fields of science, and for comparing different institutions’ performance. Moreover, some basic features of the evaluation process are discussed, in order to understand their usefulness for reinforcing the effectiveness of the peers’ final outcome.Scientific research, Evaluation, Peer review, University, Academic institutions

Review times in peer review: quantitative analysis of editorial workflows

We examine selected aspects of peer review and suggest possible improvements. To this end, we analyse a dataset containing information about 300 papers submitted to the Biochemistry and Biotechnology section of the Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society. After separating the peer review process into stages that each review has to go through, we use a weighted directed graph to describe it in a probabilistic manner and test the impact of some modifications of the editorial policy on the efficiency of the whole process

Peer review innovations in Humanities: how can scholars in A&H profit of the "wisdom of the crowds"?

Though supported by a large number of scholars in Scientific, Technical, and Medical (STM) disciplines traditional peer review does not live up to the needs of an efficient scholarly communication system and of quality research control. Therefore journals in STM are experimenting different forms of refereeing in combination with more traditional peer review system. Such is the case of PLoSONE, Biology Direct, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, and JIME. However in STM disciplines public peer review is not regarded an alternative to more traditional quality certification forms. It may be the case in the Arts & Humanities. In A&H publishing system peer review is by far a less common practice. Therefore the adoption of a social peer review process could be very useful to foster research in humanities. Scholars in A&H can profit of the interactive evaluation forms of the public peer-review to strengthen the scholarly debate, to foster active international and interdisciplinary discussions, to focus social attention on topics in Humanities, to broaden the borders of the cultural and intellectual discourse among non-scholars (public debate). This paper will provide some examples of how social peer review has been adopted by innovative communities of scholars in humanities to publish new experimental digital book models. In the digital environment the concepts of “document”, of “completeness of a document” and of “evaluation” is fast changing. In a close future in scholarly publishing it might become possible to overcome the rigid distinction between ex-ante and ex-post evaluation as the evaluation process might become an enduring part of the text itsel

Peer review and the publication process

Aims: To provide an overview of the peer review process, its various types, selection of peer reviewers, the purpose and significance of the peer review with regard to the assessment and management of quality of publications in academic journals. Design: Discussion paper. Methods: This paper draws on information gained from literature on the peer review process and the authors' knowledge and experience of contributing as peer reviewers and editors in the field of health care, including nursing. Results: There are various types of peer review: single blind; double blind; open; and post-publication review. The role of the reviewers in reviewing manuscripts and their contribution to the scientific and academic community remains important