The Open Peer Review experiment at Biology Direct
Nature magazine carries an item on a experiment in scientific publishing at Biology Direct, which is trying an open peer review system that is both distinct from the traditional peer review system, and different from the anti-credentialist communal validation process used in many peer production projects.
We cite:
“In Biology Direct, everything happens in the open: the authors select their own reviewers from the editorial board, and the reviews are not only signed but also published, alongside authors’ responses, as an integral part of each article. The reviews can be critical or even outright negative. The only condition of publication is that three members of the Biology Direct editorial board become sufficiently interested in a submission to either review it themselves or to solicit a review from an outside expert. Conversely, a paper is rejected if and only if the author cannot get three reviews. Obviously, the authors can ‘self-reject’, that is, they can withdraw their manuscript if they are not comfortable publishing it having considered its reviews.
This system overcomes the well-known ills of anonymous peer review and is, we believe, fair to both authors and reviewers. The authors gain the opportunity to discuss their work with reviewers in the open and to deal with reviewers’ suggestions on their perceived merit, without fear of rejection affecting the response. The reviewers gain public acknowledgement for their often hard work, with the results made available to the readers. Furthermore, we believe that the Biology Direct system is conducive to publication of innovative, bold papers that might have a hard time getting published in the current system. Perhaps most importantly, the Biology Direct approach to peer review could help to revitalize the culture of scientific debate that is waning in the uneven duel between omnipotent, anonymous reviewer and helpless author.
Of course, there are caveats and dangers as well. It is possible that, in this open model, many reviews will not be as brutally honest as they would have been if anonymous. In the worst-case scenario, mediocre papers with lukewarm reviews would flood Biology Direct. Furthermore, some erroneous papers might appear with reviews that are too polite or cryptic for the reader to see the red flag immediately. But Biology Direct investigates an alternative approach to scientific peer review and is not, by any means, an attempt to replace the existing system.”
Read the rest of the article to know how the experiment went.
