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Aug 18, 2015

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Tony Ross-Hellauer

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OpenAIRE Open Peer Review Tenders: Selected Projects

Aug 18, 2015

OpenAIRE proudly announces the projects selected as a result of our tender call for Open Peer Review prototypes. Each rapid innovation project receives funding of around 25,000 Euros. A large number of quality proposals were submitted, making the decision very difficult. The successful projects are:

1. The Winnower and Zenodo

Project Lead: The Winnower

The Winnower will explore if publishing post-publication peer reviews can be incentivized by elevating peer reviews to the same level as original research, with all the affordances and services of scholarly publications. Towards this goal, the Winnower will directly integrate with the Zenodo repository by (1) acting as a platform for reviews of Zenodo content, and (2) depositing reviews published on The Winnower in Zenodo.

Science thrives on discussion and debate, but some of the most meaningful discussions happen away from the public, in traditional, closed, peer review. Efforts to bring peer review from behind closed doors—to where it can serve the scientific community as a whole—have had varying degrees of success. Chief among the challenges is the lack of incentives for scholars to write and make public high quality reviews. And yet, peer review, more broadly construed, takes place every day amongst individuals, in groups, in labs, in classes around the world, and in the form of organized meetings informally referred to as “journal clubs.” These journal club discussions—disinterested reviews—tend to happen post-publication, as scholars of all stripes discuss works relevant to their research with their colleagues. Unfortunately, journal club proceedings, like the other forms of peer review, are very rarely published, if only because of the burdens of publishing, and the lack of incentives to do so. This project shall attempt to rectify this and bring such work into the open through incentivisation and the innovative alignment of Zenodo and The Winnower.

2. Open Peer Review Module for Repositories

Project Lead: Open Scholar
Project partners: DIGITAL.CSIC, e-IEO, IIIA, SECABA, ARVO

This consortium will capitalise on the existing infrastructure offered by open access repositories by enabling their conversion into functional evaluation platforms by developing a prototype open peer review module (OPRM) for open access repositories. The OPRM will initially be developed as a DSpace plugin but designed to facilitate subsequent adaptation to other repository software suites like Invenio (which underpins Zenodo) and EPrints.

The OPRM will be open, with full text of reviews publicly available alongside the original research work, and transparent,with reviewers’ identitiesdisclosed to authors and the public. It will also include a reviewer reputation system based on the assessment of reviews themselves, both by the community of users and by other reviewers, in order to allow a sophisticated weighting of each review’s respective importance for the overall assessment of a research work. This qualitative and quantitative repository-based evaluation process, able to run in parallel to traditional journal peer review, will:

Enable the peer review of any research work deposited in a repository, including data, code and monographs.

Provide novel metrics for the quantitative assessment of research quality.

Create a sophisticated reputation system for reviewers.

Allow the weighting of reviews based on the quality of previous reviewer contributions.

Facilitate the selection of relevant content from digital repositories by distinguishing material that has been validated by reviewers using tags and advanced search filters.