Spotlight on PRISM: peer review for OA Books

By Fotis Mystakopoulos and Carol Delmazo

2024 Peer Review Week is here! This year’s theme is “Innovation and Technology in Peer Review.” In an era where technological advancements are transforming every facet of our lives, the peer review process is no exception. This international week-long celebration aims to explore how innovations, artificial intelligence and digital tools are reshaping the landscape of scholarly communication.

OPERAS has been actively engaged in community projects and various initiatives to explore how this changing landscape impacts peer review. Innovation can take many forms, and we at OPERAS are committed to contributing in this area. A key focus has been on developing a service that enhances the sharing of peer review information, fostering transparency in quality assurance processes. Today we would like to remind our community of the Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM), as well as our work in other peer review-related activities.

PRISM in a nutshell

PRISM is a unique service for Open Access (OA) books that clearly indicates how a book has been peer reviewed. It provides a standardised, transparent overview of the peer review process, making it easy to understand the quality assurance applied to each book. 

PRISM is part of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). DOAB counts more than 88000 books indexed in theplatform, which is growing, and over 5000 books that are associated with PRISM. Finally, it’s important to highlight that the service is particularly useful for libraries, which can integrate the information into their catalogues via an API, giving readers clear insight into the review process. Policy makers and funders can also benefit by recommending or verifying that particular types of peer review meet their quality criteria. From a technical perspective, PRISM aligns with fundamental principles of openness, and interoperability when using metadata to describe sources. 

So far, PRISM has been adopted by 20 scholarly publishers with different profiles, such as Open Book Publisher, KIT Scientific Publishing, Taylor & Francis, University of Michigan Press, among others. Below we emphasise the work OPERAS is doing on peer review in three different directions: The GraspOS and ATRIUM (EU-Funded projects) and the CoARA working group on Recognising and Rewarding Peer Review.

GraspOS – PRISM and Peer Review in research assessment

GraspOS is aiming to develop, assess and operate an open and trusted federated infrastructure for next generation research metrics and indicators, offering data, tools, services and guidance. As part of this process, we identified PRISM as a useful service to include in the infrastructure. In May 2024, we held a webinar as part of the GraspOS Training and Webinar Series where we explored the possible impact and usage of PRISM in research assessment practices. During the webinar, we discussed how peer review is changing, and the recent topics concerning the practice of peer review, and then we delved into the practicalities of using PRISM.

From a research assessment perspective, and the usefulness of PRISM, we see how the service acts as a quality indicator. By using PRISM, any publisher can demonstrate that they have a rigorous peer review process in place and are committed to maintaining high publication standards. By having the peer review process clearly displayed, we hope that this will enhance the position of OA books in research assessment as important and validated outputs.  

We encourage everyone to watch the full webinar on Youtube and following the discussion and various topics around PRISM and research assessment:

Recognising and rewarding Peer Review: CoARA Working Group

As OPERAS we are also involved in a CoARA Working Group on Recognising and Rewarding Peer Review. We’ve also published a similar summary of our activities for the group during a recent blog post.

OPERAS has been involved in the group since 2023. We are still in search of understanding what is the best solution to reward peer review and how an individual can claim recognition for their work in peer review. The group is actively working towards producing recommendations for three categories of peer review: i) at the article/preprint level, ii) for books/monographs and, iii) for funding proposals (grants). OPERAS is particularly involved in examining the peer review process for Books/Monographs, exploring, for instance, the potential utilisation of PRISM in research assessment. The PRISM perspective was mentioned positively as an example of standardisation practice. 

ATRIUM – Peer Review Framework

OPERAS is part of the ATRIUM project together with DARIAH, CLARIN and ARIADNE. Running from 2023 to 2027, the main goal is to facilitate access to digital research infrastructures and advance frontier knowledge in the arts and humanities across disciplines, languages and media.

Within ATRIUM, OPERAS is involved (among others) in the task devoted to the creation of the ATRIUM Peer Review Framework. It aims at valuing different research outputs (data publications, training materials, software, exhibitions, interactive visualisations, etc.) as a contribution toward maximising the quality and impact of Arts and Humanities research in Europe in the context of initiatives such as CoARA. 

Bottomline, peer review is a critical component of the scientific process. It is now evident that peer review workflows are influenced by technological solutions. OPERAS is well placed to follow the developments and contribute in any way possible. 

Note on Contributors:

Author: Fotis Mystakopoulos

Author: Carol Delmazo