A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations]

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of Web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform current models while avoiding as many of the biases of existing systems as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that, at least partially, resolves many of the technical and social issues associated with peer review, and can potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments

We’ve got something for everyone: How individual differences predict different blogging motivations

The principal aims of this study were to develop a Blogging Motivations Questionnaire (BMQ) and to test the hypothesis that sex, age, and personality would be associated with individual blogging motivations. One hundred and sixty bloggers completed the BMQ and the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg, 1999). Six motivations for writing blogs were confirmed: personal revelation, emotional outlet, creative outlet, selective disclosure, social networking and advertising. Conscientiousness predicted the ‘social networking’ motivation, Agreeableness predicted ‘selective disclosure’ and Openness ‘creative outlet’. Women were motivated by ‘selective disclosure’, and men for ‘advertising’ and as an ‘emotional outlet’. Finally, older bloggers were motivated to use their blogs as a ‘creative outlet’. With reference to the Uses and Gratifications paradigm, it is likely that bloggers actively construct blogs to satisfy very personal needs. Moreover, the types of needs that one wishes to satisfy are likely to vary with personality type and with one’s age and sex.University of Wolverhampto