The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities by Alan G. Gross;Joseph E. Harmon;

Author:Alan G. Gross;Joseph E. Harmon; [Harmon;, Alan G. Gross;Joseph E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190465933
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2016-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

OPEN INTERNET PEER REVIEW IN THE SCIENCES

In 2006, Nature ran a trial of open review. After passing an initial editorial screening, authors were given the option of subjecting their manuscript to open community commentary. Out of more than a thousand papers, authors of only 71 (5%) agreed to open review. Of these 71 papers, only about half received public comments during the trial period, few of which were substantive.42 Understandably, Nature declared this trial a failure. Nevertheless, it left the door open to future experimentation:

This was not a controlled experiment, so in no sense does it disprove the hypothesis that open peer review could one day become accepted practice. But this experience, along with informal discussions with researchers, suggests that most of them are too busy, and lack sufficient career incentive, to venture onto a venue such as Nature’s Website and post public, critical assessments of their peers’ work.43

We agree that routine reliance on volunteer commentary will not work as a dependable means of open manuscript evaluation. Still, other journals incorporating some form of open review have demonstrated that researchers granted anonymity will most certainly “post public, critical assessments of their peers’ work.”44 These journals include the BMJ Open, Biology Direct, and one of the journals in the Nature publishing group, The EMBO Journal of the European Molecular Biology Organization. But the first major scientific publisher to implement open peer review that comes closest to realization of Habermas’s ISS is the European Geosciences Union (EGU). Over an eight-week period, manuscripts submitted to EGU journals are subjected to simultaneous open online review by both designated referees and members of the discourse community at large.

Begun in 2001, as of 2015 this venture consists of 16 peer-reviewed journals. All but two employ open peer review, and all are open access. All have respectable impact factors for specialty journals; they are a clear mark of success, matching or exceeding more conventional journals in climate science, some with far longer histories. Do the EGU journals have a citation advantage the others do not? While some might allege that their impact factor is inflated by the two-stage review process that all employ—publishing and archiving both revised papers and their original versions—Bornmann et al.45 have shown that this is not the case.

We focus on two of the EGU journals, the founding journals Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and Climate of the Past. We target the first because its peer-review process has been subjected to extensive scholarly analysis, the second because one of its articles, the one we will examine, is embedded in the same intensely fought controversy over global warming as that of the peer-review documents we have already analyzed. Both of these cases of open peer review exemplify a closer approximation to the ISS than traditional peer review. Both are more nearly a realization of the conditions of rational debate. Both give full voice to all interested parties in the evaluation of a paper’s clarity, argumentative competence, originality, and significance. Both allow all interested readers to evaluate

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