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Science.io. Overview: Nature's trial of open peer review. Nature (2006) | doi:10.1038/nature05535 December 2006 On 1 June this year, Nature launched a trial of open peer review. The intention was to explore the interest of researchers in a particular model of open peer review, whether as authors or as reviewers. It was also intended to provide Nature's editors and publishers with a test of the practicalities of a potential extension to the traditional procedures of peer review.
Several times during the exercise, researchers and journalists asked us whether the trial reflected a sense of dissatisfaction or concern about our long-standing procedure. On the contrary, we believe that this process works as well as any system of peer review can. Furthermore, in our occasional surveys of authors we receive strong signals of satisfaction: in the most recent survey, 74% agreed with the statement that their paper had been improved by the process, 20% felt neutral, while 6% disagreed.
The process Outcomes Distribution by subject area Figure 1: Papers by field. JIME-- Journal of Interactive Media in Education. JIME Introduction to JIME Special Issue on Open Educational Resources (OER) Tom Boyle Learning Technology Research Institute London Metropolitan University Shoreditch Building 35 Kingsland Road Shoreditch London E2 8AA The OER10 Conference at the University of Cambridge in March 2010 brought together many leading researchers and developers of open educational resources.
This special edition of JIME presents selected papers from that conference. The conference had three main themes: Content, Communities and Design. The fact that there may be major design challenges in developing OERs has not been sufficiently foregrounded. The article by Tom Browne and colleagues at Exeter University on "The challenges of OER to Academic Practice" provides a reflective and thought provoking case study. A key issue for the success of OERs is effective embedding in academic practice. Concluding Comment Reference.
Killing Peer Review. When a cadre of international scientific research powerhouses announced last month that they were teaming up to create a top-shelf, peer-reviewed free journal in the medical and life sciences fields, some called it a "triumph of open access" — proof that the tide was turning in favor of a once-radical movement aimed at cutting through the traditional oligarchies and turning scholarly publishing on its head. But to Joe Pickrell, a doctoral student in biology at the University of Chicago, the idea was not groundbreaking enough. It will not do merely to lower the barriers to viewing scholarly articles, he thought; academe must lower the barriers to reviewing them. As one might expect from an advocate of modern publishing, Pickrell took to the blogosphere. "Left unanswered … is a more fundamental question: why do we publish scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals to begin with? " Pickrell went on to describe, in general detail, the features this journal-killing app would require.