Ian Mulvany

March 5, 2021

What’s up with peer review these days?

#socscifoo #peer-review #publishing #scpb

A couple of weeks back I got invited to social science for camp - more on that later - but the topic of peer review came up. The question was - what are the best ongoing systems for making peer review a bester experience. It’s 2021, there’s got to be something, right? 

I wrote up the following very short list of resources, I know there are a ton more out there:

This survey paper has tons of great links about peer review:

A much larger version of that turned into this: (possibly a bit too long, but it accommodate a lot of authors)

When I was at eLife we introduced a version of peer review called consultative peer review where all reviewers had to agree on one combined review that went to the author. This eliminated inconsistent reviews, but it takes a bit longer to assemble, and you need to customise your review system to support it. 

Places like f1000 have a publish, then review model in place for ages. 

A few years ago PLOS experimented with a check mark like system, where reviewers would only have to check off against a fixed set of categories, but it ultimately didn't work they way they hoped, and they didn't roll out the test more widely. 

Speaking of eLife again, they are trying to introduce a distributed system for sharing reviews, so that you could follow reviews on open literature from a review community of your choice it's called https://sciety.org/ 

https://www.reviewcommons.org/ is also worth looking at. 

I wonder what OJS is supporting these days? 

Does anyone know if Janeway has any good support? 

Interested in hearing ideas. 

- ian 

About Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!