Can New Publishing Models Salvage the Benefits of Peer Review?

"Many open access journals, published by legitimate publishers and leading scientific societies, have started experimenting with alternative peer review models.

Arguably the loudest argument against the predominant model of journal peer-review is the lack of transparency. Papers get published and scientists often wonder how something passed peer-review. How did the referees miss this or that? Something fishy must be going on. The journal must have found inappropriate referees or had other compulsions to publish the paper. These criticisms in most part go little beyond gossip-column conversation, but do express genuine feelings, justified or not. Secondly, reviewers are generally anonymous to authors, though most authors claim to have done some detective work to figure out who said what in their referee reports. It has been argued by many that anonymity is a cloak behind which vindictive referees hide and write reports that demand the world of the authors or those that spew vitriol. If the editor believes in taking referee reports at their face value, then such reports could signal a paper’s death at that journal.

To address the issue of transparency, several journals (including leading ones like EMBO Journal and newer ventures like the high-profile eLife and the under-the-radar PeerJ) have instituted the policy of publishing referee reports, the authors’ response to these comments and the editor’s decision along with the paper (in some cases only with the permission of the authors). This provides readers newer perspectives to inspect and interpret the evidence presented in a paper. A few journals mandate, or at least encourage, referees to sign their reports. The idea behind this is that having their names published along with their reports, by offering them a degree of ownership over the published article, will encourage referees to be careful and constructive in their criticism. A few journals (PeerJ for example) even assign a digital object identifier (DOI) to each referee report, thus enabling future papers to specifically cite these reports. This adds value and recognition to the referee’s work."