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

Scientific communication and its relevance to research policy

This paper addresses the relation between developments in scientific communication and research. The developments in scientific communication are related to developments brought about by opportunities provided by the development and wide-scale introduction of modern information and communication technology. However, this paper does not focus on technological developments, but rather discusses how these new developments in scientific communication enable developments in research and research policy, and vice versa. The role of scientometrics and bibliometrics in this context is briefly discussed. \u