Tennant, Jonathan P. and Dugan, Jonathan M. and Graziotin, Daniel and Jacques, Damien C. and Waldner, François and Mietchen, Daniel and Elkhatib, Yehia and B. Collister, Lauren and Pikas, Christina K. and Crick, Tom and Masuzzo, Paola and Caravaggi, Anthony and Berg, Devin R. and Niemeyer, Kyle E. and Ross-Hellauer, Tony and Mannheimer, Sara and Rigling, Lillian and Katz, Daniel S. and Greshake Tzovaras, Bastian and Pacheco-Mendoza, Josmel and Fatima, Nazeefa and Poblet, Marta and Isaakidis, Marios and Irawan, Dasapta Erwin and Renaut, Sébastien and Madan, Christopher R. and Matthias, Lisa and Nørgaard Kjær, Jesper and O'Donnell, Daniel Paul and Neylon, Cameron and Kearns, Sarah and Selvaraju, Manojkumar and Colomb, Julien (2017) A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review. F1000Research, 6: 1151. ISSN 2046-1402
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of Web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform current models while avoiding as many of the biases of existing systems as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that, at least partially, resolves many of the technical and social issues associated with peer review, and can potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments.