Adventures in Signal Processing and Open Science

"I recently became interested in open review as an ingredient in open science. There has been a lot of talk about open access in recent years. That, in itself is a very important ingredient for example for the sake of fairness in the sense that the outcome of research that is often funded by taxpayers’ money should also be open to the public. It is also important for advancing science in general, because open access helps ensure that more scientists have access to more of the existing knowledge that they can build upon to bring our collective knowledge forward. My interest in this area was in part spurred by this very inspiring discussion initiated by Pierre Vandergheynst. Open access and open review are both parts of an ongoing movement that I believe is going to disrupt the traditional publishing model, but more about that later. Here, I want to focus on open review .. Reviewing a paper and then publishing it if the reviews assessed the paper as good enough is pre-publication peer review. Publishing the reviews after publication improves transparency and  and as far as I can see, PeerJ (IMO an admirable open access publisher, unfortunately not in my field) is currently practising this. You can also take the somewhat bolder step of publishing papers immediately and then conducting the review in the open afterwards (post-publication peer review). As far as I can see, F1000 Research is doing this. In my opinion, this is an even better approach as it allows public insight into papers and their reviews also for papers that are not traditionally published in the end, i.e. approved by the reviewers ... Finally, and again this fits into the bigger picture of the ongoing disruption in the scientific publishing area, the open review approach can also (and should ultimately, IMO) be taken out of the area of traditional publishers. Authors can choose to upload their papers for example to open pre-print archives (such as arXiv), their institutional repositories, or even own homepages. Reviews can then be conducted based on these papers. Ultimately, publication could then turn into a system where 'publishers' collect such papers based on their reviews and “publish” the ones they find most attractive, but that is a longer story I will get back to some other day. This approach to open peer review was really what I wanted to get to today. The thing is, several places are starting to pop up who offer platforms for open review. The ones I know of so far are: [1] PubPeer [2] Publons [3] SelectedPapers [4] PaperCritic

I will try to tell you what I know so far about these ..."