Advocating for Open Peer Review in LIS – The Librarian Parlor

"Sarah Hare is the Scholarly Communication Librarian at Indiana University, where she leads several open and library publishing initiatives. Sarah’s research interests include Open Educational Resources (OER), open pedagogy, and scholarly communication outreach to undergraduate students. Find Sarah on Twitter @SarahEHare or check out her online portfolio at www.sarahecrissinger.com.

Last fall, I taught a for-credit undergraduate course on academic editing and publishing basics. For one of our sessions, students were asked to read about different peer review models so that we could have informed discussion about double blind, single blind, open, and post-publication peer review. While there is not a standard definition of open peer review or OPR, it is generally understood to be a peer review model where the identities of the author and the reviewers are known to each other. Throughout the course, I found that students were hesitant to embrace open peer review, even after we discussed the many flaws of closed peer review and the ways in which open peer review models address these limitations. Again and again, students equated open peer review with bias and a lack of rigor. ..."