Related papers: Peer review in context
The importance of peer-review in the scientific process can not be overestimated. Yet, due to increasing pressures of research and exponentially growing number of publications the task faced by the referees becomes ever more difficult. We…
This article offers a personal perspective on the current state of academic publishing, and posits that the scientific community is beset with journals that contribute little valuable knowledge, overload the community's capacity for…
Communicating new scientific discoveries is key to human progress. Yet, this endeavor is hindered by monetary restrictions for publishing one's findings and accessing other scientists' reports. This process is further exacerbated by a large…
Scholarly journals rely on peer review to identify the science most worthy of publication. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even threatening the…
One of the virtues of peer review is that it provides a self-regulating selection mechanism for scientific work, papers and projects. Peer review as a selection mechanism is hard to evaluate in terms of its efficiency. Serious efforts to…
Scientific publishing is facing an alarming proliferation of fraudulent practices that threaten the integrity of research communication. The production and dissemination of fake research have become a profitable business, undermining trust…
The number of scientific publications is constantly rising, increasing the strain on the review process. The number of submissions is actually higher, as each manuscript is often reviewed several times before publication. To face the deluge…
Scientific publishing seems to be at a turning point. Its paradigm has stayed basically the same for 300 years but is now challenged by the increasing volume of articles that makes it very hard for scientists to stay up to date in their…
Peer review is a laborious, yet essential, part of academic publishing with crucial impact on the scientific endeavor. The current lack of incentives and transparency harms the credibility of this process. Researchers are neither rewarded…
This article challenges the assumption that journals and peer review are essential for developing,evaluating and disseminating scientific and other academic knowledge. It suggests a more flexible ecosystem, and examines some of the…
Paper journals use a small number of trusted academics to select information on behalf of all their readers. This inflexibility in the selection was justified due to the expense of publishing. The advent of cheap distribution via the…
It is not easy to rationalize how peer review, as the current grassroots of science, can work based on voluntary contributions of reviewers. There is no rationale to write impartial and thorough evaluations. Consequently, there is no risk…
Scientific research changed profoundly over the last 30 years, in all its aspects. Scientific publishing has changed as well, mainly because of the strong increased number of submitted papers and because of the appearance of Open Access…
Electronic publishing opportunities, manifested today in a variety of electronic journals and Web-based compendia, have captured the imagination of many scholars. These opportunities have also destabilized norms about the character of…
The current system of scholarly publishing is often criticized for being slow, expensive, and not transparent. The rise of open access publishing as part of open science tenets, promoting transparency and collaboration, together with calls…
The world of scientific publishing is changing; the days of an old type of subscription-based earnings for publishers seem over, and we are entering a new era. It seems as if an ever-increasing number of journals from disparate publishers…
Traditional closed peer review systems, which have played a central role in scientific publishing, are often slow, costly, non-transparent, stochastic, and possibly subject to biases - factors that can impede scientific progress and…
Scientific evaluation is a determinant of how scientists, institutions and funders behave, and as such is a key element in the making of science. In this article, we propose an alternative to the current norm of evaluating research with…
Peer review shapes which scientific claims enter the published record, but its internal dynamics are hard to measure at scale because reviewer criticism and author revision are usually embedded in long, unstructured correspondence. Here we…
There has been a lively debate in many fields, including statistics and related applied fields such as psychology and biomedical research, on possible reforms of the scholarly publishing system. Currently, referees contribute so much to…