Welcome Jan Velterop to our Advisory Board – introducing Peer Review by Endorsement – ScienceOpen Blog

"The process of peer review is in a horrible mess. There, we said it. Many others have done so and countless more think it but don’t speak out. Not a day appears to go by without the emergence of bold-faced cheating – 170 articles have now been retracted for fake peer review, or some new dubious practice – Editor quits journal over pay-for-expedited peer-review offer. Peer review itself however remains a central tenet of academic discourse but the integrity of science is being compromised and it is at risk of being forever tarnished by scandals with the result that public trust will decline further ... At ScienceOpen, the research + Open Access publishing network, we’ve spent a great deal of time and effort rethinking scientific publishing and developing a better way to do peer review. In an effort to 'lead by example' we facilitate non-anonymous, open, expert (only those with 5 or more publications per ORCID can review) Post-Publication Peer Review.  Other publishers also focus on reforming peer review, e.g. F1000 Research and The Winnower. Our observation is that despite vocally demanding reform, the scientific community is very resistant to change, though. Some commentators believe this is due to simple inertia and that probably plays a part – after all, scientific publishing remained unchanged for hundreds of years prior to these more turbulent times and people frequently acquiesce to a bad system because they are 'used to it'.  More importantly, the system of promotion and tenure compels scientists to avoid 'rocking the boat' since their published output remains a prime measure of their competence. Among the digital cognoscenti, the Impact Factor of the journal they choose to publish in is showing some signs of declining power but it still continues its vice-like grip in the minds of the majority.  The question that ScienceOpen is currently addressing is 'how do we build more peer review choice and innovation into our publishing model without participating in (the increasingly problematic) anonymous pre-publication peer review as is practiced by the vast majority of publishers'?  Enter Jan Velterop, stage left (to audience applause!). For most of you, Jan needs no introduction. Originally a marine geophysicist, he became a science publisher and has worked at Elsevier, Academic Press, Nature and BioMedCentral. He participated in the Budapest Open Access Initiative. In 2005 he joined Springer, based in the UK as Director of Open Access. In 2008 he left to help further develop semantic approaches to accelerate scientific discovery ..."