Analysis and news
choose whether or not they address any points raised by the peer reviewers. Authors are totally in charge. This is a profound evolution: publication, and then possible peer review. By doing this Wellcome Open Research (and others adopting this approach, like F1000 Research) have re-imagined the traditional processes we’re used to relying on to govern quality. Community-mediated peer review
takes things one step further into new territory. Right now, researchers can post their manuscripts to “preprint servers” where they can (almost immediately) create a permanent published, but not peer reviewed, record of their work. They might then choose to submit their work to a traditional journal, for peer-reviewed publication. A preprint server called arXiv is the
world’s most established, and has been publishing actively for many years in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Many other preprint servers are emerging, often designed to serve research disciplines or sub-disciplines. A good example is bioRxiv, the preprint
“Publisher- and editor-mediated peer review... is not immune to changes”
server for biology. In general, preprint servers are seeing ‘hockey stick-like’ growth in their use (albeit in relatively small absolute numbers compared with the say 200,000 peer reviewed journal articles that are published every month in traditional journals). Reputable preprint servers do check preprints before publishing them (bioRvix says ‘all articles undergo a basic screening process for offensive and/or non-scientific content and for material that might pose a health or biosecurity risk and are checked for plagiarism’). They don’t do peer review. But they may enable the communities of researchers that use preprint servers to decide themselves to assemble, to peer review and offer comments on preprints, and thus again after publication to take care of quality – including integrity and ethics. Publisher- and editor-mediated peer review, the traditional model that most
journals use and that governs quality for most research articles, is not immune to changes. Look at the scale that some new journals are achieving (let’s take Nature Communications and PLOS One as examples of general journals publishing many thousands of articles per year; and Ecology and Evolution and Cancer Medicine as examples of specialist journals publishing many hundreds of articles per year). Each of these journals has achieved new kinds of scale, measured by the numbers of articles they are peer reviewing and publishing. And each has updated its editorial team and processes to handle that kind of scale. But each still uses a pretty traditional model for peer review, and governs integrity and ethics in the ways that we’re used to. So, with evolving and completely new
peer review models, we do need to ask ourselves: who looks after ethics, integrity – the most essential aspects of quality – now? And are we happy with how they’re doing it? We’ll find out.
Chris Graf is director for research integrity and publishing ethics at Wiley, and is co-chair of COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics
The Scholarly Publishing Research Cycle 2018
Perspectives and recommendations from the publishing, library and research sectors
Research information
Download the report here:
www.researchinformation.info/scholarly-publishing-research-cycle-2018
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