How to attract reviewers for open / post-publication review? | Adventures in Signal Processing and Open Science

" ... With the recent appearance of several open peer review platforms, for example PubPeer, Publons etc. – more here, there will be a need to attract reviewers to such platforms. Sufficiently flawed papers seem to attract enough attention to trigger reviews, but it is my impression that papers that are generally OK do not get a lot of post-publication review. This is perhaps not such a big deal for papers that have been already been published in some journal with closed pre-publication review – the major downside is that the rest of us do not get to see the review comments. But, if you are going to base an entire journal on post-publication peer review you will want to ensure at least a few reviews of each published paper as a sort of stamp of approval. The Winnower – the new journal based entirely on open post-publication peer review that I have previously written about here – is about to launch. First and foremost they will of course need to attract some papers to publish. Their in my opinion very fair (when you compare to other open access journals) price of $100 should help and the fact that they span a very broad range of scientific disciplines should also give them a lot of potential authors. They also want to attract reviewers to their papers. The platform is open to review by anyone, but in order to ensure a minimum number of reviews of each paper with at least some experts on the topic among them, this seems like a good idea. But how do you do this? As a new journal there are no previous authors to draw on. It can probably get difficult to get in touch with sufficiently many qualified reviewers across all of the journal’s disciplines and on top of that, reviewers may be more reluctant to accept since the reviews will be open with reviewers’ identities disclosed. What can be done to attract sufficiently many reviewers? ..."