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funders have created a system where higher- education funding doesn’t really fl ow into OA but into infrastructure, including libraries, and into direct costs of research projects. At the moment researchers are squirreling away money from research grants for OA publishing but that’s not infi nitely scalable.’ Another complication he noted was that


the distinction between green and gold OA is not as clear as it might seem, pointing out the relationship between the Wellcome Trust, which provides funding in the UK, and the UK PubMed Central repository. ‘Publishers need to be aware of funders’ motivations as well as those of researchers,’ he noted. Next year, the results of the Europe-wide


PEER project (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) will be released. The project has been looking at the effects on publishers and researchers of wide-scale deposit of scholarly materials in repositories – as well as tackling green OA challenges such as non uniformity of publisher outputs and varying requirements by repository. One intriguing observation – and one that


could disappoint advocates of green OA – is the extremely low rate of author deposits. Of the around 53,000 articles deposited into the repositories taking part in the study until October 2011, only 170 papers were deposited by the authors themselves; the bulk were deposited by the participating publishers. ‘Maybe [the low take-up] was just because


it was a project but authors did receive specifi c invitations to deposit and still didn’t do so,’ observed Chris Armbruster, research manager of the PEER Project.


From PEER to peer review Another often-debated topic for scholarly publishers is that of peer review. As Adrian Mulligan, deputy director, research and academic relations at Elsevier pointed out, peer review is a large-scale operation: ‘In 2009 there were 1.4 million research articles published in peer-reviewed journals – that’s around one every 22 seconds – and every review takes two to four hours.’ Elsevier has been working with Sense


about Science to survey researchers about their attitudes to peer review. The partners found that 69 per cent are very satisfi ed or satisfi ed with it. The study also found that the approach


to peer review that people perceive as most effective is double-blind – where neither the authors nor the reviewers know each other’s identities.


18 Research Information DEC 2011/JAN 2012


methods employed in the cited study – the kind of discussions that scientifi c publishers hope for on journal articles. Despite concerns about open peer review,


there are some major publications that are fi nding success with alternative models. The submission guidelines of the journal PLoS ONE, for example, says: ‘PLoS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership.’ As Mark Patterson, director of publishing


Karl Ziemelis


In contrast, it found that the researchers surveyed are less likely to submit papers to journals with open review systems and are also less likely to agree to review papers for those journals. Such observations have been backed up


by other studies. For example, a randomised experiment by the BMJ Group found that 55 per cent of reviewers declined to review if their report would be published with the article and that papers took longer to review if the reviews were intended to be published, said Mulligan. And the 2006 Nature Publishing Group


(NPG) study into open peer review attracted a high-level of general interest but a low uptake of authors agreeing to participate and very few technical comments. Post-publication peer review has also been investigated in various studies, for example in a 2010 study by NPG. ‘Post-publication


at PLoS explained, ‘Editors ask if the science is rigorous, ethical, properly reported and the conclusions are backed by data but they don’t ask if it’s important. The journal has seen very steady growth and has a lot of content and citations and this model has been emulated by other publishers.’ One of the major criticisms of the peer-


review process from researchers is the length of time it takes. So what of some of the approaches to help speed this up? One big project to tackle this is the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium. The aim of this is to help streamline the peer- review process by journals working together and sharing review reports to save the same paper being reviewed several times by different journals, possibly by the same reviewer. Despite the possibilities of saving time for reviewers and publishing papers more quickly, less than fi ve per cent of manuscripts are forwarded to another consortium member, according to Mulligan of Elsevier.


‘In 2009 there were 1.4 million research articles published in peer-reviewed journals – that’s around one every 22 seconds – and every review takes two to four hours’


commenting is mostly content-free,’ observed Karl Ziemelis, chief physical sciences editor of Nature at the meeting. Interestingly, however, a recent article


in the Guardian newspaper that was highly critical of the peer-review process and scholarly publishers, and illustrated this with an example of a scholarly paper that the newspaper article’s author saw as inadequate, attracted a large number of detailed reader comments. Many of the comments were about the


peer-review process but many were also about the merits or otherwise of the scientifi c


Karl Ziemelis of Nature noted that sharing


reports across journals and even across- publishers happens both formally and informally. However, he said, ‘many authors prefer papers to be re-reviewed even though those that are shared are done faster and often have higher acceptance rates.’ This comment reveals some of the tensions beneath many of the plans to transform access and the publishing process more generally. Although scholarly publishers face many pressures to evolve, in many cases researchers are far more conservative about changes than the publishers themselves.


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