Sense About Science held a workshop on peer review in collaboration with the Research Information Network, Vitae, Elsevier and the Voice of Young Science. This afternoon event was held at the University of Sussex, Brighton on 5 March 2010 and was free and for early career researchers in all sciences, engineering and medicine (PhD students, post-docs or equivalent in first job). The workshop discussed the process of peer review in journal publishing and explored the criticisms of the peer review process. What does peer review do for science? Does it detect fraud and misconduct? Will it illuminate good ideas or shut them down? The RIN’s Liason and Partnerships Officer, Branwen Hide, spoke at the event on ‘The changing scholarly communications landscape: What does this mean for peer review?’ For more information on the programme, visit http://www.rin.ac.uk/news/events/research-publishing-it-reviewing-it-and-talking-about-it-publicly

1. The changing scholarly communications landscape
What does this mean for peer review?
Sense about Science Workshop
Branwen Hide
March 5th, 2010

2. Outline
Traditional journal publishing and the cost of
peer-review
Changing scholarly communications
landscape
Social media
The emergence of data as a publication
Some food for thought

3. Traditional journal publishing and the cost of
peer review

4. UK Journal Article Publication and Distribution Costs
450.0 424.9
400.0
350.0
300.0
£ Millions
250.0
200.0
150.0 125.1 119.0
100.0
63.7 63.0 54.1
50.0
0.0
Non-cash peer Direct fixed Variable cost Indirect cost Surplus Total cost
review cost
First copy cost £244.1
Publication Distribution
Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system, RIN, May 2008

5. The changing scholarly communications
landscape
Move to electronic and open access publishing
Author-pays, pre-prints, post-prints
Increase use of social media for dissemination
and access of information
Blogs, twitter, YouTube etc.
Publishers are also thinking of new and
innovative ways of adding value to their
publications
Publishing research data, linking to existing data
bases, and enhanced annotations
Comment, moderate, and rating systems
Peer review
Difficult to get people to respond

6. New forms of peer review – some
examples
PLosOne
2-stage assessment
Handling editor is acknowledged
PLoSCurrents Influenza
Expert panel screens submissions
It is expected that the information with be ‘officially’ published at a later date
arXiv
Combination of moderators and endorsements
EMBO
Publish the ‘Review Process File’
Reviewers remain anonymous
BMC Medicine
Publish the pre-publication history
Reviewers are not anonymous
F1000
This is not a journal it is a “literature awareness tool”
experts in the field evaluate and comment on the most interesting papers they
read each month – review peer reviewed journal articles

7. Social Media
Blogs
valid because a number of people follow them?
link to peer-reviewed literature? researchbloging.org
Is there a role for the institution?
Wikipedia, WikiGenes
actively encourages people to edit and improve the quality of the
post
WikiGenes requires you to cite where you have got that
information from when you post it
Twitter
The problem of retweeting and only having 140 characters

8. The emergence of data as a publication
There is a move toward the publication of research
data
Either as a supplement to an existing article, as an
independent publication, or archiving it in a database
Currently data that is archived is generally not
subjected to peer review
The data creator is responsible for ensuring the quality of data
Personal knowledge of how the data were collected
and analyzed greatly influences one trust in the data
This can be increased with good quality metadata that
describe the origins and how the data was processed
Currently there are a number of discussion on the
need/feasibility of formal peer review for data

9. Some food for thought
Does discipline have an affect on the type of peer review?
Does the type of publication influence the type of peer review?
Why don’t commenting and rating systems work more
effectively?
Is a new system of peer review required for blogs and other
social media?
Can data be peer reviewed the same way as a journal article?
How do we asses the quality of metadata?
Are their training implications for researchers?
How will the changes in the peer review process
affect the public understanding (trust) of science?

10. Branwen Hide
Liaison and Partnership Officer
Research Information Network
Branwen.hide@rin.ac.uk
www.rin.ac.uk

11. UK Costs of Scholarly Communications
10.00
9.00 8.61
8.00
7.00 6.23
6.00
£ Billions
5.00
4.00
3.00
2.00 1.34
1.00 0.43 0.54
0.07
0.00
Research Publishing & Access User search Reading total
production Distribution provision and print cost
Research Publication & Access Usage & Consumption
Production distribution