OpenAIRE Open Peer Review survey and other activities

Written on Sep 28, 2016.

workshop2016 As OpenAIRE continues to push the boundaries of Open Science, it has been carrying out a range of activities to investigate how openness and transparency can improve scientific processes in the area of quality evaluation (See: Open Peer Review in OpenAIRE).

Survey

In the context of its Open Peer Review activities

OpenAIRE is currently running a survey about OPR. We like to get to know about your opinion about OPR in general, its special flavors, and about the expected effects of OPR on the system of scholarly communication.

Survey on Open Peer Review – tell us your opinion! Take the survey now

It takes around 15 minutes to complete and will remain open until Friday 7th October.

Experiments

To encourage experimentation in OPR, especially to investigate ways in which OPR technologies might integrate with OpenAIRE’s infrastructure in mid-2015 OpenAIRE ran an open call for tenders for open peer review prototypes/experiments. Twelve bids were received, of which two were chosen in a thorough evaluation process:

Newsitem: OpenAIRE Open Peer Review Tenders: Selected Projects

(1) A consortium of organizations led by Open Scholar CIC (lead investigator Pandelis Perakakis)

They aimed to turn repositories into functional evaluation platforms by building an open peer review module for integration with Open Access repositories and then implementing this module in two high-profile institutional repositories.

Blogpost: Developing the first Open Peer Revi ew Module for Institutional Repositories
Blogpost: First OPR-Module for repositories

(2) The Winnower (lead investigator Joshua Nicholson)

The Winnower sought to integrate the Winnower platform with repositories like Zenodo via DOIs and APIs to facilitate open peer review of repository objects, as well as offering financial incentives to encourage open participation in the sharing of ‘journal club’ reviews and documenting user experiences via survey.

In addition, a third experiment was already specified in the OpenAIRE2020 project proposal, led by

(3) OpenEdition (lead investigator Julien Bordier)

OpenEdition aimed to use open services such as the annotation software hypotheses.org and OpenEdition’s platform for academic blogs to model a workflow (selection, review and revision) that would develop blog articles into peer reviewed publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Blogpost: OpenEdition and OpenAIRE – experiments in open peer review

For further information about the experiments and their results, you can find the experiments report – open for post publication comments via our blog.

Workshop

On June 7th 2016, in conjunction with The International Conference on Electronic Publishing (Elpub) in Göttingen, OpenAIRE held a workshop to explore the “models, benefits and limitations” of Open Peer Review (OPR).

Newsitem: Workshop announcement and programme

It brought together interested stakeholders to facilitate discussion on different aspects of OPR. The special focus of the workshop was on ‘challenges of open peer review’ – especially problems of a common understanding, of incentivizing participants as well as ethical challenges.

Newsitem: Open Peer Review: Models, Benefits and Limitations (short report)

For further information about the workshop, please see the

Longer Report of the workshop
Video recordings and slides of the keynotes and the panel discussion

Among this, we have been working on a common definition and terminology around OPR, that is supposed to be provided to the community as a base of a wider discussion. Part of it is already included in the current survey.