Search Results for ‘"open-source peer review"’
New Directions for SSRN
| Peter Klein |
I see that registered users of SSRN can now post comments on other people’s papers. Maybe this feature has been around for some time but I just noticed it. Is this a small step toward open-source peer review? Or a move toward social networking? (What’s next, the SSRN status update or Super Poke?)
3 comments 8 July 2009
More on Open-Source Peer Review
| Peter Klein |
I’ve thought about setting up an academic version of the Fail Blog where scholars could post copies of rejected manuscripts, nasty referee reports and editor’s letters, and — of course — favorite student papers. But some current experiments in open-source peer review (a topic we’ve covered before) may do the trick. For example, this biology journal is making all submitted manuscripts and referee reports visible to the public:
Publication of research findings is very important to scientists. But scientists tend only to know about how things work at a scientific journal through personal experience and hearsay. By making the evaluation of manuscripts visible to everyone, The EMBO Journal aims to encourage constructive referee and author argumentation. Younger scientists will gain valuable insight into how to publish their research findings as well as how to deal with critique.
I’m not sure how anonymity will be preserved, and some potential authors and reviewers will likely shy away from participating. A very interesting experiment, to be sure. Here’s a wikipedia entry on the open-source peer-review movement more generally.
9 comments 16 January 2009
Economists Try Open-Source Peer Review
| Peter Klein |
It didn’t work so well for Nature, but a new economics journal, e-conomics, is giving open-source peer review a try. The journal, associated with the Kiel Institute, “adopts a ‘Linux approach’ to publication, viewing research as a cooperative enterprise between authors, editors, referees and readers.” After a paper is submitted, it is posted on the journal’s site and registered readers are invited to comment and to rate other readers’ comments. Formal referee reports are also solicited and, when received, published on the site, along with author responses to the reader discussion and to the referees. If the paper is accepted, this history is preserved along with the final version of the paper, which remains freely available.
There are already some good submissions available for public review, including Oliver Williamson’s “Transaction Cost Economics: An Introduction,” a revised version of which will also constitute the introduction to the Elgar Companion to Transaction Cost Economics.
3 comments 7 March 2007
Nature Gives Up on Open-Source Peer Review
| Peter Klein |
The open-source, wiki model does not, apparently, work well for scientific publishing. Nature had placed a selection of submitted manuscripts online and invited feedback from researchers around the world, promising to take the feedback into consideration as part of the formal review process. But the scientific community showed little interest. Few authors were willing to participate in the experiement, and the online papers didn’t get much feedback.
During Nature’s trial, only 5 percent of 1,369 papers ranging from astronomy to neuroscience that were selected for traditional peer review were also posted on the Internet for open commentary. Of those, 33 papers received no comments. The rest received a total of 92 technical comments.
The journal concluded that many researchers were either too busy or had no real incentive in evaluating their colleagues’ work publicly. In addition, none of the editors found the posted comments influenced their decision whether a paper gets published.
I’m a little surprised by this. According to Lerner and Tirole, the open-source model should work in settings with strong reputation effects. One would think that in small, close-knit, specialized scientific communities the incentives to provide useful feedback — assuming it’s not anonymous — would be fairly high. On the other hand, there are opportunities to do so at conferences, seminars, workshops, the faculty lounge – and even blogs! – and the opportunity costs of doing it via Nature’s setup may have been too high.
3 comments 11 January 2007
