New forms of open peer review will allow academics to separate scholarly evaluation from academic journals. | Impact of Social Sciences

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-08-21

Summary:

"If you asked a commercial academic publisher what services they offer in exchange for their extortionate journal subscription rates, their reply would include a short list with administration of the peer review process featuring as the unique selling point. The publisher would be lucky for the conversation to end there, but an informed and insistent questioner would point out that peer reviews are performed by external academics providing their services for free, without even soliciting any meaningful academic recognition. To make life even easier for publishers, journal editors —also working for free— often ask authors to propose a list of recommended reviewers to effortlessly expand their database of potential academic helpers. As long as reviewers remain anonymous, no one can ever tell whether or not an editor intelligently selected suitable experts in the field, or simply invited the reviewers that authors suggested in their confidential cover letters.  Managing the peer review process costs publishers next to nothing and yet it is indeed the single most important element that supports their business model and protects their revenue stream. The logic is simple. Journals use a 'rigorous' peer review process to build their prestige by establishing high rejection rates —despite the fact that today online publishing and electronic typesetting could actually increase publication slots and maintain higher acceptance rates at next to no cost. Academics need to publish in prestigious journals as a means to achieve recognition and secure tenure. In exchange, they are willing to give away the copyright of their articles and to offer their review services for free. Commercial publishers take advantage of the situation by including prestigious journals in 'Big Deal' subscription bundles that are given to libraries as 'all or nothing' offers.  Someone could argue that there is no problem with journals rejecting 95% of submitted articles, with academics spending their valuable time (mostly paid with public money) reformatting and resubmitting the same articles over and over again, and with publishers (adding close to zero value to the whole process) enjoying millions in profits at a time of global economic crisis when libraries around the world are being forced to cut down on subscription budgets. Even if someone were to have no objection to that, what is really profoundly problematic and ultimately unacceptable is that this whole enterprise is based on the economics of scarcity — customarily applied in the context of limited material resources where value is accrued from exclusivity. Knowledge, however, is a totally different fruit. Contrary to material goods, the more knowledge is freely shared, the more value it obtains ... Publishers, journals and academics are stuck in a vicious circle with the current academic publishing model threatening to stagnate the flow of knowledge. This circle can be broken at any moment by any one of its main key players. Publishers could charge prices according to the real value they add to the process. Journals could start to care less about their prestige and increase their acceptance rates — something that can easily be accomplished without loosening their quality standards. The academic community could gain control of scholarly evaluation and communication. Time will tell which of these possibilities is the more probable ... According to its advocates, the current research evaluation system may be problematic, but is the only practical one available. Indeed, many alternative peer review models have been proposed, but they all assume that 'peer review has to remain under the control of academic journals'. Perhaps the time has come to challenge this assumption ...  The LIBRE (LIBerating REsearch) Project developed by Open Scholar C.I.C. —a not-for-profit organisation supported by a growing, open community— is one such alternative. LIBRE challenges the fundamental assumption that peer review can only be arranged and handled by journal editors. It is a free, multi-disciplinary platform that allows academic authors to invite expert peers to formally review their work. Full-text reviews are linked to the original manuscripts and the identities of both the authors and the reviewer are disclosed from the beginning of the review process. This open and transparent procedure permits direct communication and collaboration between authors and reviewers during all stages of the review. Reviewers help authors improve their

Link:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/08/20/libre-project-open-peer-review-perakakis/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.green oa.libraries oa.peer_review oa.impact oa.quality oa.prestige oa.librarians oa.prices oa.budgets oa.libre_project oa.repositories

Date tagged:

08/21/2013, 07:10

Date published:

08/21/2013, 03:10