Self-organising peer review for preprints – A future paradigm for scholarly publishing | Impact of Social Sciences
peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-04-18
Summary:
"Preprints – rapidly published non peer reviewed research articles – are becoming an increasingly common fixture in scholarly communication. However, without being peer reviewed they serve a limited function, as they are often not recognised as high quality research publications. In this post Wang LingFeng discusses how the development of preprint servers as self-organising peer review platforms could be the future of scholarly publication....
In order to address these issues, we propose a system of self-organising peer review (SOPR), operating in accordance with 8 rules:
- Only corresponding authors can submit articles to the preprint server and all authors of submitted papers are automatically registered as reviewers.
- A registrant can submit several papers per year, but a maximum of six manuscripts will be peer reviewed.
- Papers are reviewed in the order in which they are submitted.
- After submission the author’s information is concealed before the article is posted on the server. Only after the review is finished will the identity of the author/s be revealed on the article.
- All papers are rated by scale of 1 to 5, with 5 indicating best quality.
- Each new registrant is given a reviewer qualification level, also set at 1-5. The reviewer qualification level is determined, at the first registration, by registrants’ publication and citation record such as H-index or other scientometric indicators. Each registrant’s review qualification level will be adjusted every three years.
- Each manuscript is reviewed by 3 registrants.
- A penalty mechanism for if an author or reviewer does not accept a review assignment, or does not complete review on time. Whereby, their own papers will not be reviewed and their right to use the preprint database will be suspended for a period of time...."