FOSE: A framework for open science evaluation

“A hot topic among scientists lately is a discussion of shortcomings of the current system for evaluation of scientific work: journal-based peer-reviewing, and whether we should turn to alternatives or improve this system. These developments have been termed the academic spring.  Many agree that more openness is the way to go. Niko Kriegeskorte and Diana Deca invited Alexander Walther and me to contribute to their special issue on post-publication evaluation in Frontiers. In our contribution we argue that the key to getting social-network-like reviewing going is interoperability, so that both new (e.g. thirdreviewer.com) and existing players (publishers) can compete fairly. We therefore propose a standard for the format of such evaluation content and a protocol for its exchange between these providers, together called FOSE (abstract). We welcome anyone interested to comment and/or join us. As a next step we plan to prepare a demo implementation of FOSE, at fose1.org.”