Rate My Journals

16 December 2013 at 12:42 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Researchers: You rate products and sellers on Amazon and Ebay, you describe your travel experiences on TripAdvisor, and your students judge you on ratemyprofessors.com. I don’t know any systematic evidence on this, but consultants and journalists seem to think that companies are better off letting customers rate (and rant) online, even if this makes it more difficult to manage the brand.

A new venture called SciRev is encouraging researchers to rate their experiences with particular journals: how long are papers turned around, how good are the referee reports, how responsive is the editorial office. It’s not quite open-source peer review, because the specific papers and authors are anonymous (as far as I can tell), but it represents an interesting experiment in opening up the publishing process, at least in terms of author feedback on journals.

SciRev is a website made by researchers for researchers. The information provided by you and your fellow authors is freely available to the entire research community. In this way we aim to make the scientific review process more transparent. Efficient journals get credits for their efforts to improve their review process and the way they handle manuscripts. Less efficient journals are stimulated to put energy in organizing things better. Researchers can search for a journal with a speedy review procedure and have their papers published earlier. Editors get the opportunity to compare their journal’s performance with that of others and to provide information about their journal at our website.

SciRev aims to help science by making the peer review process more efficient. This process is one of the weakest links in the process of scientific knowledge production. Valuable papers may spent several months to over a year at reviewers’ desks and editorial offices before a decision is taken. This is a serious time loss in a process that in other respects has become much more efficient in the last decades. SciRev helps speeding up this process by making it more transparent. Researchers get the possibility to share their review experiences with their colleagues, who therefore can make a better informed choice for a journal to submit their work to. Journals that manage to set up a more efficient review process and which handle manuscripts better are rewarded for this and may attract more and better manuscripts.

There are only a few reviews at this point, so not much information to consume, but I like the concept. And I may be submitting some reviews of my own… (Thanks to Bronwyn Hall for the tip.)