ScienceGeist

The development of preprint servers as self-organising peer review platforms could be the future of scholarly publication.

Swiss funding agency banned applicant-nominated referees after a 2016 study found evidence of bias. Those results are now being made public.

Thousands of Nature referees have chosen to be publicly acknowledged.

This paper looks at peer review as a cooperation dilemma through a game-theory framework. We built an agent-based model to estimate how much the quality of peer review is influenced by different resource allocation strategies followed by scientists dealing with multiple tasks, i.e., publishing and reviewing.

This paper investigates the fate of manuscripts that were rejected from JASSS- The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, the flagship journal of social simulation. We tracked 456 manuscripts that were rejected from 1997 to 2011 and traced their subsequent publication as journal articles, conference papers or working papers.

This paper investigates the impact of referee behaviour on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We focused on the importance of reciprocity motives in ensuring cooperation between all involved parties. We modelled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias. We built various simulation scenarios in which we tested different interaction conditions and author and referee behaviour. We found that reciprocity cannot always have per se a positive effect on the quality of peer review, as it may tend to increase evaluation bias. It can have a positive effect only when reciprocity motives are inspired by disinterested standards of fairness.

Although peer review is crucial for innovation and experimental discoveries in science, it is poorly understood in scientific terms. Discovering its true dynamics and exploring adjustments which improve the commitment of everyone involved could benefit scientific development for all disciplines and consequently increase innovation in the economy and the society.

This paper investigates the impact of referee reliability on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We modeled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias.

The National Institutes of Health uses small groups of scientists to judge the quality of the grant proposals that they receive, and these quality judgments form the basis of its funding decisions.  In order for this system to fund the best science, the subject experts must, at a minimum, agree as to what counts as a “quality”proposal.  We investigated the degree of agreement by leveraging data from a recent experiment with 412 scientists.

Peer review is not only a quality screening mechanism for scholarly journals. It also connects authors and referees either directly or indirectly. Thi…

This paper presents an index that measures reviewer contribution to editorial processes of scholarly journals. Following a metaphor of ranking algorit…

Paper finds that the disciplinary background and the academic status of the referee have an influence on their reviewing tasks.  Articles that had been recommended by a multidisciplinary set of referees were found to receive subsequently more citations than those that had been reviewed by referees from the same discipline.

By forming a pool of funding applicants who have minimal qualification levels and then selecting randomly within that pool, funding agencies could avoid biases, disagreement and other limitations of peer review.

A review of the challenges and lessons learned in managing the development of Libero Reviewer.

Visible progress has been made  in publishing -  researchers are no longer bound by the limits of geography or the contents of their local library  -  but is the potential being truly maximised?

This essay traces the history of refereeing at specialist scientific journals and at funding bodies and shows that it was only in the late twentieth century that peer review came to be seen as a process central to scientific practice

One of the latest creations to emerge from the Research Institute's lab, Apograf is an interactive platform that houses an extensive collection of scientific publications and is building a mechanism for incentivising peer review. 

Study shows that peer review of grant applications at the SNSF may be prone to biases stemming from different applicant and reviewer characteristics. Based on this study, the SNSF abandoned nomination of reviewers by applicants, and made members of panels aware of the other systematic differences in scores.

Hindawi partners with Publons to improve and speed up the peer review process.

Gender bias in peer review has been much discussed in the wider research community. However, there have been few attempts to analyse the issue within the social sciences. This post highlights research undertaken by the Regional Studies Association to investigate the effect of gender on peer review outcomes.

Nature welcomes a registry that supports experiments to improve refereeing.

ReimagineReview records trials that are probing the pros and cons of different approaches to review.

Open peer review (OPR) is moving into the mainstream, but it is often poorly understood and surveys of researcher attitudes show important barriers to implementation. There is a clear need for best practice guidelines for implementation.

No formal investigations have been conducted into the efficacy or potential influence of reviewer recommendations on editorial decisions, and the impact of this on the expectations and behaviour of authors, reviewers and journal editors. This article addresses key questions about this critical aspect of the peer review submission process.

A new study suggests that making reviewers' reports freely readable doesn't compromise the peer-review process.

Milton Packer wonders if the time has come for instant replay.

Wiley claim they are committed to moving towards greater openness and reproducibility of research, including increasing transparency in peer review

The EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowships selection process undergoes analysis.

To increase transparency in science, some scholarly journals have begun publishing peer review reports. Here, the authors show how this policy shift affects reviewer behavior by analyzing data from five journals piloting open peer review.