scholarly journals Revealing reviewers` identities as part of open peer-review and analysis of the review reports

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cezary Bolek ◽  
Dejan Marolov ◽  
Monika Bolek ◽  
Jovan Shopovski
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Scientific Journal ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Open Review ◽  
Review Reports ◽  
Single Blind ◽  
Peer Review Procedure

This research article is aimed at comparing review reports in which the identity of the reviewers is revealed to the authors of the papers with those where the reviewers decided to remain anonymous. The review reports are gathered as part of the peer review process of the European Scientific Journal (ESJ). This journal maintains a single-blind peer review procedure and optional open review. Reviewers are familiar with the names of the authors but not vice versa. When sending the review reports, the reviewers can opt to reveal their identity to the authors. 343 review reports from members of the ESJ editorial board, gathered within the period of May to July 2019, were analyzed. The data analysis was performed using Python programing language based on NumPy, Pandas, and Scipy packages.Half of the reviewers decided to choose the open option and reveal their names to the authors of the papers. The other half remained anonymous. The results show that female reviewers more often decide to remain anonymous than their male colleagues. However, there is no significant difference in the review reports on the basis of gender or country of institutional affiliation of the reviewers. Revealing identity did not make difference in reviewers’ point appraisal in the review reports. This difference was not significant. However, majority of the reviewers who recommended rejection in their review reports were not willing to reveal their identities. Even more, those reviewers who revealed their identity were more likely to recommend acceptance without revision or minor revision in their review reports.

scholarly journals Why Academics Choose to Publish in a Mega-Journal

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 348
Author(s):  
Jovan Shopovski ◽  
Dejan Marolov
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Peer Review ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Scientific Journal ◽  
Review Procedure ◽  
Peer Review Procedure ◽  
Significant Factors

With their broad scope, high publishing volume, a peer review process based on the scientific soundness of the content, and an open access model, mega journals have become an important part of scholarly publishing.The main aim of this paper is to determine the most important factor that influenced researchers’ decisions to submit their academic work to these type of journal. To this end, an online survey has been disseminated from November 2016 to August 2017, targeting the corresponding authors of the European Scientific Journal, ESJ. Data from 413 corresponding authors was collected.The focus was mainly on how they discover the journal and what led them to submit a paper to the journal. However, questions concerning their satisfaction with the peer review procedure were also part of the survey.The results have shown that a recommendation of a colleague is not only the main channel through which authors found out about the journal, but is also the major reason they decided to submit their paper to a mega-journal. Furthermore, the quality of the editorial board of the journal, the strong portfolio of papers and the open access concept are also significant factors in encouraging submission to a mega-journal. A majority of the respondents are satisfied with the communication and peer review procedure of the mega-journal, which might encourage new submissions in the future.

scholarly journals Rejection rate and reasons for rejection after peer review: a case study of a Russian economics journal

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evgueniya A Balyakina ◽  
Ludmila A Kriventsova
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Scientific Journal ◽  
Rejection Rate ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Editorial Team ◽  
Publication Ethics ◽  
Double Blind ◽  
Blind Review ◽  
Review Reports

 Background:  Peer review remains the only way of filtering and improving research. However, there are few studies of peer review based on the contents of review reports, because access to these reports is limited. Objectives: To measure the rejection rate and to investigate the reasons for rejection after peer-review in a specialized scientific journal.  Methods:  We considered the manuscripts submitted to a Russian journal, namely ‘Economy of Region’ (Rus Экономика региона), from 2016 to 2018, and analysed the double-blind review reports related to rejected submissions in qualitative and quantitative terms including descriptive statistics. Results: Of the 1653 submissions from 2016 to 2018, 324 (20%) were published, giving an average rejection rate of 80%. Content analysis of reviewer reports showed five categories of shortcomings in the manuscripts: breaches of publication ethics, mismatch with the journal’s research area, weak research reporting (a major group, which accounted for 66%of the total); lack of novelty, and design errors. We identified two major problems in the peer-review process that require editorial correction: in 36% of the cases, the authors did not send the revised version of the manuscript to the journal after receiving editorial comments and in 30% of the cases, the reviewers made contradictory recommendations. Conclusions: To obtain a more balanced evaluation from experts and to avoid paper losses the editorial team should revise the journal’s instructions to authors, its guide to reviewers, and the form of the reviewer’s report by indicating the weightings assigned to the different criteria and by describing in detail the criteria for a good paper.

scholarly journals What is open peer review? A systematic review

F1000Research ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Ross-Hellauer
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Peer Review ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Open Science ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Open Review ◽  
Broad Subject ◽  
Review Reports ◽  
The Many ◽  
Definition Of

Background: “Open peer review” (OPR), despite being a major pillar of Open Science, has neither a standardized definition nor an agreed schema of its features and implementations. The literature reflects this, with a myriad of overlapping and often contradictory definitions. While the term is used by some to refer to peer review where the identities of both author and reviewer are disclosed to each other, for others it signifies systems where reviewer reports are published alongside articles. For others it signifies both of these conditions, and for yet others it describes systems where not only “invited experts” are able to comment. For still others, it includes a variety of combinations of these and other novel methods. Methods: Recognising the absence of a consensus view on what open peer review is, this article undertakes a systematic review of definitions of “open peer review” or “open review”, to create a corpus of 122 definitions. These definitions are then systematically analysed to build a coherent typology of the many different innovations in peer review signified by the term, and hence provide the precise technical definition currently lacking. Results: This quantifiable data yields rich information on the range and extent of differing definitions over time and by broad subject area. Quantifying definitions in this way allows us to accurately portray exactly how  ambiguously the phrase “open peer review”  has been used thus far, for the literature offers a total of 22 distinct configurations of seven traits, effectively meaning that there are 22 different definitions of OPR in the literature. Conclusions: Based on this work, I propose a pragmatic definition of open peer review as an umbrella term for a number of overlapping ways that peer review models can be adapted in line with the ethos of Open Science, including making reviewer and author identities open, publishing review reports and enabling greater participation in the peer review process.

scholarly journals What is open peer review? A systematic review

F1000Research ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Ross-Hellauer
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Peer Review ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Open Science ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Open Review ◽  
Rich Information ◽  
Broad Subject ◽  
Review Reports ◽  
Definition Of

Background: “Open peer review” (OPR), despite being a major pillar of Open Science, has neither a standardized definition nor an agreed schema of its features and implementations. The literature reflects this, with numerous overlapping and contradictory definitions. While for some the term refers to peer review where the identities of both author and reviewer are disclosed to each other, for others it signifies systems where reviewer reports are published alongside articles. For others it signifies both of these conditions, and for yet others it describes systems where not only “invited experts” are able to comment. For still others, it includes a variety of combinations of these and other novel methods. Methods: Recognising the absence of a consensus view on what open peer review is, this article undertakes a systematic review of definitions of “open peer review” or “open review”, to create a corpus of 122 definitions. These definitions are systematically analysed to build a coherent typology of the various innovations in peer review signified by the term, and hence provide the precise technical definition currently lacking. Results: This quantifiable data yields rich information on the range and extent of differing definitions over time and by broad subject area. Quantifying definitions in this way allows us to accurately portray exactly how ambiguously the phrase “open peer review” has been used thus far, for the literature offers 22 distinct configurations of seven traits, effectively meaning that there are 22 different definitions of OPR in the literature reviewed. Conclusions: I propose a pragmatic definition of open peer review as an umbrella term for a number of overlapping ways that peer review models can be adapted in line with the aims of Open Science, including making reviewer and author identities open, publishing review reports and enabling greater participation in the peer review process.

Editorial Policies Overview

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Chen
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Review Process ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Free Access ◽  
Scientific Quality ◽  
Editorial Policies ◽  
Scientific Experts ◽  
Open Access Publisher ◽  
Single Blind

As a global open access publisher, Tech Science Press is dedicated to disseminating cutting-edge scholarly research among scientific community by advocating an immediate, world-wide and barrier-free access to the research we publish. To ensure all publication meeting our ethical and scientific quality standards, each submission goes through a rigorous review process, including pre-peer-review by relevant editorial board, a single-blind peer-review process by scientific experts, revision following reviewers’ comments as well as final approval by the editorial board.

scholarly journals Open, single-blind, double-blind: which peer review process do you prefer?

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth C Moylan ◽  
Simon Harold ◽  
Ciaran O’Neill ◽  
Maria K Kowalczuk
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Review Process ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Double Blind ◽  
Single Blind

scholarly journals Peer Review in Law Journals

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jadranka Stojanovski ◽  
Elías Sanz-Casado ◽  
Tommaso Agnoloni ◽  
Ginevra Peruginelli
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Research Misconduct ◽  
Evaluation Criteria ◽  
Research Integrity ◽  
Publication Type ◽  
Chi Square

The field of law has retained its distinctiveness regarding peer review to this day, and reviews are often conducted without following standardized rules and principles. External and independent evaluation of submissions has recently become adopted by European law journals, and peer review procedures are still poorly defined, investigated, and attuned to the legal science publishing landscape. The aim of our study was to gain a better insight into current editorial policies on peer review in law journals by exploring editorial documents (instructions, guidelines, policies) issued by 119 Croatian, Italian, and Spanish law journals. We relied on automatic content analysis of 135 publicly available documents collected from the journal websites to analyze the basic features of the peer review processes, manuscript evaluation criteria, and related ethical issues using WordStat8. Differences in covered topics between the countries were compared using the chi-square test. Our findings reveal that most law journals have adopted a traditional approach, in which the editorial board manages mostly anonymized peer review (104, 77%) engaging independent/external reviewers (65, 48%). Submissions are evaluated according to their originality and relevance (113, 84%), quality of writing and presentation (94, 70%), comprehensiveness of literature references (93, 69%), and adequacy of methods (57, 42%). The main ethical issues related to peer review addressed by these journals are reviewer’s competing interests (42, 31%), plagiarism (35, 26%), and biases (30, 22%). We observed statistically significant differences between countries in mentioning key concepts such as “Peer review ethics”, “Reviewer”, “Transparency of identities”, “Publication type”, and “Research misconduct”. Spanish journals favor reviewers’ “Independence” and “Competence” and “Anonymized” peer review process. Also, some manuscript types popular in one country are rarely mentioned in other countries. Even though peer review is equally conventional in all three countries, high transparency in Croatian law journals, respect for research integrity in Spanish ones, and diversity and inclusion in Italian are promising indicators of future development.

scholarly journals Development of ARCADIA: a tool for assessing the quality of peer-review reports in biomedical research

BMJ Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. e035604
Author(s):  
Cecilia Superchi ◽  
Darko Hren ◽  
David Blanco ◽  
Roser Rius ◽  
Alessandro Recchioni ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Biomedical Research ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Final Version ◽  
Report Quality ◽  
Study Results ◽  
Review Reports ◽  
Definition Of

ObjectiveTo develop a tool to assess the quality of peer-review reports in biomedical research.MethodsWe conducted an online survey intended for biomedical editors and authors. The survey aimed to (1) determine if participants endorse the proposed definition of peer-review report quality; (2) identify the most important items to include in the final version of the tool and (3) identify any missing items. Participants rated on a 5-point scale whether an item should be included in the tool and they were also invited to comment on the importance and wording of each item. Principal component analysis was performed to examine items redundancy and a general inductive approach was used for qualitative data analysis.ResultsA total of 446 biomedical editors and authors participated in the survey. Participants were mainly male (65.9%), middle-aged (mean=50.3, SD=13) and with PhD degrees (56.4%). The majority of participants (84%) agreed on the definition of peer-review report quality we proposed. The 20 initial items included in the survey questionnaire were generally highly rated with a mean score ranging from 3.38 (SD=1.13) to 4.60 (SD=0.69) (scale 1–5). Participants suggested 13 items that were not included in the initial list of items. A steering committee composed of five members with different expertise discussed the selection of items to include in the final version of the tool. The final checklist includes 14 items encompassed in five domains (Importance of the study, Robustness of the study methods, Interpretation and discussion of the study results, Reporting and transparency of the manuscript, Characteristics of peer reviewer’s comments).ConclusionAssessment of Review reports with a Checklist Available to eDItors and Authors tool could be used regularly by editors to evaluate the reviewers’ work, and also as an outcome when evaluating interventions to improve the peer-review process.

scholarly journals Peering into peer review: Good quality reviews of research articles require neither writing too much nor taking too long

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula CABEZAS Del FIERRO ◽  
Omar SABAJ MERUANE ◽  
Germán VARAS ESPINOZA ◽  
Valeria GONZÁLEZ HERRERA
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Review Process ◽  
Average Length ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Research Articles ◽  
Review Time ◽  
Feedback Quality ◽  
Review Reports ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract The value of scientific knowledge is highly dependent on the quality of the process used to produce it, namely, the quality of the peer-review process. This process is a pivotal part of science as it works both to legitimize and improve the work of the scientific community. In this context, the present study investigated the relationship between review time, length, and feedback quality of review reports in the peer-review process of research articles. For this purpose, the review time of 313 referee reports from three Chilean international journals were recorded. Feedback quality was determined estimating the rate of direct requests by the total number of comments in each report. Number of words was used to describe the average length in the sample. Results showed that average time and length have little variation across review reports, irrespective of their quality. Low quality reports tended to take longer to reach the editor, so neither time nor length were related to feedback quality. This suggests that referees mostly describe, criticize, or praise the content of the article instead of making useful and direct comments to help authors improve their manuscripts.

scholarly journals Chief Editor's Voice

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Prof. Dr. Ashok Kumar Jha
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Review Process ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Research Articles ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Research Journal ◽  
Service Commission ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Double Blinded

The RMC of the campus feels much pleasure to publish the annual multi-disciplinary peer reviewed research journal DRISTIKON as vol. 11(1). The journal and the articles published in it are clear evidence and fulfill the requirements laid down by UGC, Nepal, Tribhuvan University Service Commission, APA 7th ed. and other platforms. The journal is designed to serve as an outlet for an intellectual forum for the communication of intellectual ideas among professionals and other social scientists in relevant areas in general and with special reference to Nepal. The board welcomes all the professionals, researchers and all those interested to publish their research findings with significant contribution to society, education sector and international platform. Authors are also encouraged to submit papers which are related to current international, national or local issues. Almost all the scholarly and research articles published in the journal undergo the editorial peer review process prior to publication to fulfill the requirements of peer review process guided by UGC, Nepal and international standard. The goal of the peer review process is to ensure that the valid article is accepted, the messy article cleaned up, and the invalid article rejected. The board of editors has accepted the reviewer’s recommendations. All the articles submitted for publication are subjected to rigorous double blinded peer review to ensure its quality before it gets published.  Manuscripts submitted to this journal must not have been published or accepted for publication or submitted for publication elsewhere. The journal strictly follows guidelines of APA 7th ed. as well as strongly opposes plagiarized contents without proper citation. Following the necessary corrections and additions resulting from the review process the twenty accepted papers were included into the issue covering the specific areas of Nepali, English, Political Science, Science and Management. The cooperation extended by scholars and institutions in publishing this journal is highly appreciated. The opinions expressed in the articles are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of either the publisher or the editorial board. All manuscripts once published becomes the property of the publisher. We hope that inspiration and encouragement from the readers will continue to keep the ‘Dristikon’ alive and develop. We are also looking forward to receiving your comments and suggestions for further improvement in the future. We are grateful to the peer reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. The editorial board heartily thanks all the writers who have contributed research articles. We would also like to give special thanks to the campus chief Mr. Damodar Bhandari for his constant support in terms of finance and administration for the publication of this journal.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document