Open Science and Citizen Science

Peer review is central to the publishing process and has a fundamental role to play in maintaining the integrity of the published literature and advancing discovery.
At BMC, we have always supported innovation in peer review and were one of the first publishers to truly open up peer review in 1999. We are leading on new initiatives to further develop peer review, and suggest ways to improve the process in this report. In keeping with BMC’s commitment to research in progress, we are partnering with PEERE a trans-disciplinary, cross-sectorial collaboration aiming to improve peer review.
We also publish a dedicated journal Research Integrity and Peer Review which publishes research into peer review. Where we can make a difference we will, pilot new approaches and partner with others. Here are some of our initiatives currently underway, if you have ideas or feedback on how we can continue to improve peer review, please contact us.

We believe that this approach combines the immediacy and openness of a preprint with the scrutiny and curation of a peer-reviewed publication. The features of the eLife peer-review process are: we only review research papers that have been made available as preprints
all decisions are made by editors who are active researchers we do not artificially limit the number of articles we publish or have a set acceptance rate editors and reviewers discuss their reviews with each other before reaching a decision on a manuscript; extra experiments, analyses, or data collection are only requested if they are essential and can be reasonably completed within about two months (please also see, “Publishing in the time of COVID-19”) our editorial process produces two outputs: i) public comments from the peer reviewers on the strengths and weaknesses of the work; ii) detailed feedback on the manuscript for the authors; accepted manuscripts published in eLife include the decision letter from the editor to the authors and the author responses to the decision letter. The overall aim is to make peer review faster, fairer, and more open. eLife does not support the Impact Factor and is a co-founder of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Regularly updated metrics relating to the eLife editorial process are available in our Author Guide.

F1000Research operates formally invited peer review after publication, which is fully open and transparent, and led by the article authors. Reviewers are usually suggested by the authors following certain reviewer criteria. Peer review reports are published – alongside the reviewers’ full names and affiliations – as soon as they’re submitted, and remain attached to the article if it is indexed with sites such as PubMed and Scopus. Peer review directly determines whether an article will be indexed, via the approval status that reviewers select when reviewing the article.

Open Peer Review has become a popular topic of discussion and debate. Though not as prevalent as blinded models, and often viewed as a progressive or alternative approach, Open Peer Review isn’t really new. In fact, Open Peer Review in one form or another has been part of the conversation in scholarly communications since the 1980s (McGiffert, 1988). Today, many scholarly journals employ versions of Open Peer Review in their day-to-day practice, including BMJ, BMC, Royal Society Open Science, Nature Communications, and, of course, the PLOS journals, to name just a few. The odds are good that you’ll be invited to participate in an Open Peer Review process–if you haven’t already.

Proceedings A gives authors and reviewers an option to choose between traditional and open peer review. Traditional peer review is a relatively private affair, with the referee reports being seen by only a handful of individuals and the name of the referee being seen by even fewer. The move towards transparency in scientific publishing has led to a number of journals adopting a more open model. Where authors opt for open peer review, Proceedings A will make the editorial process transparent for all accepted papers, by publishing reviewer reports, the substantive part of decision letter after review and the associated author responses alongside published articles. This will allow readers to better assess the published paper and provide post-publication comments (which will also be published). If the reviewers have opted to disclose their names this will be included too. Referee reports are made public under the CC-BY open access licence.

When we think of quality in peer review, the theme of this year’s Peer Review Week, we inevitably start thinking about transparency. How do we make visible improvements to quality in peer review when much of the process happens behind closed doors? At Wiley, we’re helping researchers to thrive when they embrace open research. Opening up critical parts of what we do, for example by making peer review transparent, is totally in-step with that and delivers new levels of accountability and insights for researchers.
During Peer Review Week 2018, we announced the launch of the world’s first scalable approach to transparent peer review (TPR) with Web of Science Group (Publons and ScholarOne). We started with a pilot at one journal, Clinical Genetics. We gave authors the choice to have peer reviewers’ reports, their own authors’ responses, and the editor’s decision letters published alongside their articles, hosted by Publons and made openly available. We started to make that peer review history accessible via a link from the authors’ published article, like this, and we provided fully citable DOIs for everything. Our early results with Clinical Genetics were compelling, and in January 2019 we added 10 more journals to our pilot.