some links for
http://www.biology-direct.com/info/instructions/peerreview – author invites reviewers, reviews are published along with the paper. all online, with index. See also http://www.biology-direct.com/
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/pdf/1745-6150-5-6.pdf – example of partial open process, with reviews publishing with the paper.
http://www.atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.net/review/review_process_and_interactive_public_discussion.html – two stage publicly open peer review. all online, with index.
http://www.atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.net/Copernicus_Publications_Two_Stage_Concept.pdf
http://www.oekonux.org/journal/list/archive/msg00201.html – two stages (discussion period) and more internal openness in peer reviewing.
http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature05535.html pre-blogosphere explosion conclusion.
http://scg.unibe.ch/download/champion/ – recognize the role that often exists.
http://lehors.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/irony-of-all-peer-review/ – sad.
http://www.scienceboard.net/community/perspectives.142.html – have colleagues review it and have reviewers names published along with articles.
Open-process publishing and reviewing advantages
The following benefits could be gained with open-process publishing and peer reviewing:
1) Quality of submissions would increase a lot over time – because new authors would see the history of the entire process and learn from it (archive of all submissions, peer reviews, editorial board comments, etc). In addition, because they would be less likely to submit badly written texts with no adjustments to publicly stated journal guidelines – a big problem for editors, i am told repeatedly, is the large amount of low quality initial submissions. In the current system, with externally invisible submissions, the reputation cost of submission for authors it too low: they can submit any rubbish without adjusting it to the journal’s guidelines. The only people who see these disrespectful acts (towards work of editors, especially volunteer work), and who associate it with author’s name, are editors. If submissions were openly visible, the cost of submitting random, unadjusted, low quality, undeveloped papers would be far higher, since such disrespectful behaviour would be publicly linked to the author. Similar goes for open peer reviewing too.
2) Quality and innovation in published texts would increase too – because of the above point one, and because opening of the whole, or most, of the publishing process would improve the quality of peer and editorial board reviews, for the same reputation cost reasons stated in the point one. Doing low quality, superficial peer or editorial reviews would be publicly exposed and vice versa – possibility of lost, or gained reputation as an editor or peer reviewer would be a motivating factor. In the current model, all of that work is visible only to those few who participate.
3) Journals who implement this process well would attract more agile and risk taking authors – can lead to less politically correct, career-opportunist position taking from both authors and reviewers and to an opportunity for more bold leaps from both sides. In short, openness would steer reviewing assessment to be more focused on the merit of the work assessed, hence the authors can be more confident in submitting such, more risk taking, less compromise driven works. This would lead us away from ‘The modern academic system that has become almost a training ground for conformity’ (Whitworth and Friedman 2009a)
4) Journals that implement this process well would significantly raise the dynamics/pace of research – because some of the most in-depth debates that now happen on academic blogs [5] could thanks to the faster and open-process peer reviewing and commenting be integrated into journals in some form. The form could be shorter, still referenced as academic papers are, and arguments even more focused that those in an average 8000 paper. My impression is that most journal papers revolve around few core ideas (often a single one), not necessarily always connected as closely as to require a single paper. Today, i believe that some of these ideas originate in blog posts. We could enable those high quality 700-800 words blog posts to be submitted, first as rough drafts, and then in a fully referenced short, still burst alike, form of 1500-2000 words.
5) Journals would gain readership and reputation – because of all the above and because of below internal benefits and their public visibility.
It is important to note that this type of open work and early releasing is not always possible
Internal benefits for journals
1) Clearer structure and visibility of tasks and processes contributes to recognizing own most important workers – due to breaking of a large task (publish a new issue) down in a set of defined and openly recorded smaller steps, more precise and transparent allocation of tasks and responsibilities exposes who does what, how and when. recognizing contribution, and lack of it, is one of the keys for the survival and improvement of the project.
2) Increased focus on implementation work and continuously carried out processes. award the doers, sidelines the moaners. structured open processes make it possible for an organization, collective, group to not be open and welcoming to any kind of participation, internally nor externally, but be selective instead. More of this kind of openness means more structure, more internalised working discipline, more commitment, and more ability to improve cooperation with precision.
Closed processes allow more corruption of organizational goals: the less we know about the processes, components and their relations, the more individuals can utilise the results of collective work, or of work of others, for own goals and benefits (in academia, careerism).
3) Easier project management – increased task modularity and status (full status of submission = stage + state, see below) real-time visibility (anyone can anytime check the stage and state of any submission on the web system used ) allows for better project management, easier allocation, delegation of tasks, and a more precise sense of progress and problems.
4) Decision making into the hands of the people who matter most – because who does what, when and how becomes visible, and because those who carry out continuously implementation work matter most for the organization, decision making can be more in their hands
In the Open Organizations project, we defined this similarly: ‘anyone doing implementation work in the group, or has done such work in the recent past (e.g. within the past two months), can participate in its decision making’,
5) Attract new volunteers and reduce impact of the existing counter-productive internal participants – utilizing the above task and process openness and visibility, journal editorial boards could use decision making rules similar to MIA to attract volunteers. Through linking of decision making rights and defined implementation work, it would be recognized that certain type of work that could be done by external participants matters more than mere presence of existing internal talk and communication intensive participants. To reduce risk, only certain decision making rights can be given to new participants to start with.
