Opening peer-review: our new paper on SOAPdenovo2 shows how it works - GigaScience blog

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-01-03

Summary:

"With everyone in a reflective mood as the year comes to a close, one of the big scientific trends of 2012 has obviously been the high profile that open-access and more open methods of carrying out science has received. With the Elsevier boycott, UK Finch report, and launch of a number of innovative new schemes in publishing open-access research and data (including F1000 Research, eLife, PeerJ and of course GigaScience), 2012 has been talked of as the year of an 'academic spring' that has started to shake up the centuries old, stuffy and closed system of scientific discourse. On top of changes to the way scientists and readers are demanding they can access and mine the literature and data, new incentives and mechanisms to release and publish data (of which we have written extensively), the process of peer-review has also come under the spotlight, and there has been a lot of talk on the deficiencies of this system. Many newly launched journals have tried to make the system more transparent, using systems such as post-publication peer-review (e.g. F1000 Research), pre-print servers (e.g. the increasing acceptance of arXiv in biology), providing access to anonymized (e.g. EMBO journals) or partial (elife) parts of the peer-review history, or encouraging reviewers to opt-into open peer-review (PeerJ, and experimented with a little at PLOS). At GigaScience we have decided to take this process one step further and ask for open peer-review as default, and as our aims are to promote more open, reproducible and transparent-science we feel it promotes accountability, fairness, and importantly gives credit to reviewers for their hard efforts. A new publication in the journal today provides a particularly useful example of how this process has worked, so we have decided to highlight it here in GigaBlog, and would welcome feedback and comments on our approach..."

Link:

http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/gigablog/2012/12/27/opening-peer-review-our-new-paper-on-soapdenovo2-shows-how-it-works/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.comment oa.plos oa.peer_review oa.quality oa.elife oa.peerj oa.gigscience oa.arxiv oa.f1000research

Date tagged:

01/03/2013, 15:39

Date published:

01/03/2013, 10:39