Introducing MetaROR: An open peer review platform for metaresearch - Research on Research

"In the past five years, we’ve witnessed an incredible surge in innovation and energy directed towards metaresearch. Scholars from diverse disciplines have converged to form vibrant communities, pioneering new methodologies and research practice, to understand and improve how research findings are produced and disseminated.

This is exciting, but it also presents challenges, particularly in how we communicate and evaluate research.

The challenges we face in the field of metaresearch: 

• Siloed Organisation: Metaresearch disciplines, such as philosophy of science, science and technology studies, and scientometrics, often operate independently, with limited cross-disciplinary interaction.
• Limited Openness in Research Practices: Much research in our field is shared only in its final state, typically as an article published in a journal, with open science practices like preprinting, open peer review and data sharing uneven across metaresearch communities.
• Limited Accessibility of Literature: Paywalls and publication fees restrict access to metaresearch literature, excluding readers and authors who cannot afford to pay.
• Pressure on Peer Review: Peer review is under pressure, delaying the communication of research outcomes and making it difficult to organise reliable processes for evaluating research results.
• Lack of Community Ownership: Commercial ownership of key metaresearch journals limits communities’ control over publication and peer review processes.

These problems are also present in other fields, but we believe the field of metaresearch has a particular responsibility to develop and test innovative solutions. 

To this end, RoRI and the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science (AIMOS) are launching MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review), a new platform for open peer review of metaresearch. Platform services and access are free for authors and readers."