Given the role peer review ostensibly plays in quality control, and the diversity of models currently in use, understanding what peer review is, and what it does, is considered a high priority ( Tennant and Ross-Hellauer, 2020).ĭespite its diverse, and customarily closed nature, peer review continues to be widely perceived as a valuable endeavour that adds credibility to scholarship by both researchers ( Nicholas et al., 2015) and the public ( Pew Research Center, 2019). Peer review comes in many forms, with each journal adopting their own unique set of policies governing aspects of the process such as: the amount and range of expertise solicited, the level of anonymity afforded, the availability of documentation to reviewers and the readership and the degree of interaction between stakeholders. However, beyond this broad definition, it is unclear exactly what peer review entails in practice. This process of journal-organised, pre-publication evaluation to guide editorial decision-making, commonly referred to as ‘peer review’, is a standard procedure currently employed by over 65,000 English-language journals ( Ulrichsweb, 2020). IntroductionĪlmost all scientists who pursue publication of their research via academic journals will be familiar with the scrutiny of their work by their peers. We hope the findings will inform the debate about the role and transparency of peer review in scholarly publishing. Our results provide a window into what is largely an opaque aspect of the scientific process. A majority expressed support for co-reviewing, reviewers requesting access to data, reviewers recommending citations to their work, editors publishing in their own journals, and replication studies. Editors were also asked for their views on five issues related to publication ethics. Most journals did not have an official policy on altering reports from reviewers, but 91% of editors identified at least one situation in which it was appropriate for an editor to alter a report. We found that 49% of the journals surveyed checked all manuscripts for plagiarism, that 61% allowed authors to recommend both for and against specific reviewers, and that less than 6% used a form of open peer review. This study presents the results of a survey of 322 editors of journals in ecology, economics, medicine, physics and psychology. Peer review practices differ substantially between journals and disciplines.
0 kommentar(er)
