Self-organising peer review for preprints – A future paradigm for scholarly publishing | Impact of Social Sciences

"Preprints – rapidly published non peer reviewed research articles – are becoming an increasingly common fixture in scholarly communication. However, without being peer reviewed they serve a limited function, as they are often not recognised as high quality research publications. In this post Wang LingFeng discusses how the development of preprint servers as self-organising peer review platforms could be the future of scholarly publication....

In order to address these issues, we propose a system of self-organising peer review (SOPR), operating in accordance with 8 rules:

1. Only corresponding authors can submit articles to the preprint server and all authors of submitted papers are automatically registered as reviewers.
2. A registrant can submit several papers per year, but a maximum of six manuscripts will be peer reviewed.
3. Papers are reviewed in the order in which they are submitted.
4. After submission the author’s information is concealed before the article is posted on the server. Only after the review is finished will the identity of the author/s be revealed on the article.
5. All papers are rated by scale of 1 to 5, with 5 indicating best quality.
6. Each new registrant is given a reviewer qualification level, also set at 1-5. The reviewer qualification level is determined, at the first registration, by registrants’ publication and citation record such as H-index or other scientometric indicators. Each registrant’s review qualification level will be adjusted every three years.
7. Each manuscript is reviewed by 3 registrants.
8. A penalty mechanism for if an author or reviewer does not accept a review assignment, or does not complete review on time. Whereby, their own papers will not be reviewed and their right to use the preprint database will be suspended for a period of time...."