International Open Access Week 2022: Open for Climate Justice

This week is International Open Access week, an annual event about raising awareness and taking action on open access. This year’s theme is “Open for Climate Justice”, considering how open access and open research can help in tackling the climate crisis.

Sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.

– https://www.openaccessweek.org/theme

What is climate justice, and where does open access fit in?

As Earth Overshoot Day gets earlier each year, it’s clear that the climate crisis is a global emergency which needs global action to tackle it. Open access can help ensure that work on climate change isn’t locked away behind paywalls where it can only be accessed by people working at institutions that can afford expensive journal subscriptions.

Image credit: NASA Source: https://images.nasa.gov/details-GSFC_20171208_Archive_e001532

The term “climate justice” acknowledges that the effects of climate change are not being felt equally and that the impact is hitting marginalised populations harder – exactly the people who are also less likely to be able to access academic work and research on climate change. Opening up access to this work can be beneficial both directly and indirectly, because as well as making the work itself more accessible, it can enable people working on these issues to find others working in the same field, as well as raising the profile of their own research, helping to create opportunities for global collaboration.

What does open access look like in our corner of the world?

Here at SGUL we enable open access through our repository, SORA, where SGUL academic staff with a profile in our CRIS can have their full text manuscripts made available for articles that would otherwise only be available with a subscription to the published journal article (as well as those that are published open access).

We also maintain a Research Data Repository that can host a wide variety of outputs as well as data, making them freely available where possible whilst also allowing for access controls where appropriate (eg for sensitive medical data).

As well as these, we also have a number of Read and Publish deals with various publishers to allow SGUL corresponding authors to publish open access in some or all of their journals at either a reduced cost or at no direct cost. New deals for this year include those with Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer, which join existing deals from publishers such as OUP and Wiley. Full details on our deals, including eligibility requirements and lists of included journals, are on our webpages.

What about the rest of the global community?

There are however questions round the equitability of these Read and Publish deals and whether they are shifting the inaccessibility burden from readers to researchers: instead of readers being unable to access published research due to the cost barrier, are marginalised researchers being shut out of the publishing process due to the cost of open access fees? Are these deals just concentrating all the money for open access on the same publishers that were already making the most money from subscriptions?

The open access landscape is shifting rapidly as questions around fairness and access lead to new publication models, which lead to new questions and new discussions on how to move towards a world where everyone is able to participate in the academic community without barriers due to cost.

What might help?

Image by 🆓 Use at your Ease 👌🏼 from Pixabay

Initiatives such as PLOS Community Action Publishing aims to ‘make selective publishing more equitable’ and has capped margins so the more institutions who join, the lower costs become. Not for profit journal publishing as undertaken by the Microbiology Society, uses income generated to reinvest in their community. Both these publishers’ journals are covered by SGUL publishing agreements.

Many charitable funders and institutions are increasingly advocating that authors include a rights retention statement in their manuscripts on submission to subscription journals, to ensure the accepted manuscript can be made openly available even if the published version is not.

As well as traditional journal publishing, other OA publishing models such as preprinting may not require OA fees at all – for instance there are no open access fees for publishing on medRxiv or bioRxiv. ASAPBio, a not for profit scientist community, has produced FAQs on public preprint feedback, including How can preprint review contribute to equity?.

Diamond open access publishing (in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers) is being advanced as another initiative, as this recent conference demonstrates.

Find out more

Want to join the conversation but don’t know your AAM from your RRS? Curious about Creative Commons licences? Take a look at our new Open Access Glossary – and drop us a line if you run across something we don’t have a definition for yet!

Any questions? Get in touch with us:

• sora@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about the CRIS and making your research publications available via SORA)
• openaccess@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about publishing open access)
• researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about research data and other types of research output)

We look forward to hearing from you.

Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager

Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant

Carly Lightfoot, Library Research Services Manager

Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

SGUL’s Open Research New Year’s Resolutions

It’s 2022 and we have some New Year’s open research resolutions to help you find open services and make your research more findable and accessible. We shared them on Twitter throughout last week, and in case you missed any, we’ve collected them all together here to give you some ideas for what you could do to make your research more open in 2022. 

To make your research practices more open in 2022 you could… 

1. look at this jargon busting poster on Open Research Demystified: 10 Things You Need to Know About Open Research. We presented this poster at Research Day in 2019 – did you see it there? 

2. create records in the CRIS on acceptance for new publications and upload the accepted manuscripts. We’ll then be able to make your articles open access via SORA for anyone to access without needing to pay (publisher restrictions permitting). 

3. read up on finding existing research data: here’s eleven quick tips for finding research data, published in PLoS Computation Biology, which will help you find and assess data to use in your own research. 

4. install the CORE Discovery browser extension to help find open access copies of paywalled research articles. Haven’t heard of the largest aggregator of open access research papers? Here’s a short video about CORE. 

5. get up to speed with The State of Open Data Report 2021 for perspectives from around the world on open data, data quality and curation, and more. 

6. learn more about how open science is gaining global momentum. As a starting point, you could take a look at this post from cOAlition S welcoming the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.  

7. link up your ORCID and Figshare accounts to connect your research outputs to your unique identifier: see Figshare’s help page on how to sync ORCID to find out how. (Don’t have an ORCID yet? Register here – it’s quick, easy and free!) 

8. investigate the options for corresponding authors to publish open access at no direct cost. SGUL has signed up to a variety of publisher deals for free or reduced cost open access publication – for more details and to see which publishers are included, see our page on Paying Open Access Fees. 

9. upload your supplementary data to the SGUL data repository. For help with this, see Figshare’s help article on publishing a dataset at the same time as the associated paper. 

10. start a conversation with your colleagues and collaborators on how you can make our research practices more open. You could think about publishing via an open research platform (such as Wellcome Open Research), or consider what other types of research outputs you create and could make available (and get credit for), eg datasets, protocols, code, posters and presentations. 

And don’t forget to keep an eye on our twitter feed for information about open research events throughout the year. 

Any questions? Get in touch with us: 

• sora@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about the CRIS and making your research publications available via SORA) 
• openaccess@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about publishing open access) 
• researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about research data and other types of research output) 

We look forward to hearing from you. 

Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant 

Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian 

Liz Stovold, Research Data Support Manager 

Hi! Who are you? Building trust through identity in scholarship online

How can you build trust online and promote yourself and your research? In a poster presented at the recent SGUL annual Research Day, we highlighted some commonly used tools to manage and curate your research profile online, along with some pros and cons of each one.

In this blog we give you some more background and things to think about when considering your scholarly and professional identity online, to help you pick the tools that are right for you, starting with the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID).

ORCID

ORCID is a unique persistent identifier for researchers. Signing up to ORCID helps to distinguish you from other researchers and connects you with your achievements. It is simple to sign up for an ORCID, although it is possible to run into difficulties.This blog post from UK ORCID Support outlines some of the weird and wonderful ways some researchers have used these IDs – and how to put things right, for instance if you have managed to register for more than one ID: ORCIDs in the Wild: A Field Guide to the Popular Persistent Identifier

There have been some recent updates to the ORCID interface, and SGUL researchers will be pleased to know that SGUL’s data repository hosted in Figshare, now has an integration with ORCID. When you create an item in Figsharea record will be automatically created in your ORCID account (if you have that function enabled – it’s opt-in).

In CRIS, you can confirm your ORCID ID (Menu > My Account > Data source search > Automatic claiming), so that publications will automatically be added to your publication list.

Twitter

Twitter can be a great place to form a community and develop relationships with other researchers, but it can take a lot of time and effort to build and maintain a profile there. As well as tweeting links to your research, you’ll need to spend time engaging with other researchers to establish your presence and build your relationships, as well as keeping abreast of community norms around things like hashtag usage. You’ll also need to be aware of the possibility of abuse and harassment: SGUL has recently provided some guidance on what to do if you’re the target of trolling. Twitter may not be a low effort medium, but it can allow you to make connections and have conversations that you might otherwise never have had the opportunity for.

Thinking about trying out Twitter? This article in PLoS: Computational Biology has ten tips for getting started.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash  

Publons

The Publons platform allows you to record, gain credit for, and promote your peer reviewing work, work which may have been hidden in the past. Your public profile shows your verified peer reviews as well as publications, and citation metrics, though be aware that the content is based on coverage in Web of Science and may not consider anything not indexed there. The Publons (now Web of Science) Academy offers free peer-review training.

Clarivate are also running a webinar next week on building online researcher identity and open peer review

Other platforms

ResearchGate: While sharing and networking sites such as ResearchGate provide services of value to many researchers, ResearchGate is not considered an open access repository, as you need to create an account to login.

Academia.edu, Impact Story, Kudos: These are other sites that can help you share and explore the online impact of your work. These allow you different options of how to sign in (eg Facebook, Twitter) and freemium use is limited to certain features.

The value of open repositories

 Bear in mind that commercially or privately owned companies could be taken over at any time^1,2 and there is no certainty the content or services will be available on the same terms in future. ResearchGate recently had to take down, at the publishers’ request³, full text articles that researchers had posted which contravened copyright rules.

The sharing platforms that SGUL provides for our researchers, Figshare and SORA, structure the information about the works deposited, making this available in a machine-readable format so these can be more easily found. There are quality assurance and licence information checks before the records are made available.

Speakers at Research Day talked about the acceleration of the work around trials to speed up vaccine development (while maintaining rigour and safety), and about preprinting their research. (For more on preprints, see our blogpost on preprints in the biological, medical and health sciences).

More community driven and not for profit services and digital initiatives such as ORCID, institutional repositories and funder publishing platforms (such as Wellcome Open Research and NIHR Open Research), are helping to open up research and connect the research back to the researchers in a very visible way, allowing for wider scrutiny of the research and who and is communicating it. So it’s worth thinking about how you present yourself and your research online

Any questions? Get in touch with us

• researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about research data and other types of research output) 
• sora@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about the CRIS and making your research publications available via SORA) 
• openaccess@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about publishing open access) 

The SGUL Communications Team can also help you promote your research and reach a wider audience 

We look forward to hearing from you. 

Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant 

Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian 

Liz Stovold, Research Data Support Manager 

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¹ Elsevier Expands Footprint in Scholarly Workflow (2017) Inside Higher Ed https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/03/elsevier-makes-move-institutional-repositories-acquisition-bepress (Accessed 8/12/2021)

² Wiley Acquires Open Access Innovator Knowledge Unlatched (2021) https://newsroom.wiley.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2021/Wiley-Acquires-Open-Access-Innovator-Knowledge-Unlatched/ (Accessed 8/12/2021)

³ A note on recent content takedowns (2021) https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/a-note-on-recent-content-takedowns (Accessed 8/12/2021)

Open Access Week 2021: It Matters How We Open Knowledge

This week is Open Access Week! This year’s theme is “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity”, focusing on how to make sure all knowledge producers and consumers are able to participate equally. To find out more about this year’s theme and keep up with conversations and events, visit www.openaccessweek.org, and keep an eye on the official hashtag, #OAWeek.

We’ll be tweeting and retweeting from the library Twitter account, @sgullibrary, throughout the week, and if you’d like to see posts we’ve made in previous years, take a look at the Open Access Week tag.

Open access and open research are about making sure that knowledge is shared as freely and equitably as possible.

The theme of this year’s open access week intentionally aligns with the recently released UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. The recommendations put forward a framework to support scientific collaboration, and foster open practices, raising the profile of being “open” at an international level.

Students, researchers, academics may all be consumers or producers of research. Open science can mean making publications and data available, but it’s also about enabling a more collaborative, transparent research environment – where results are reproducible and researchers can easily access and build upon each other’s work – and where research is opened up to others such as charities, patient groups, and citizen science.

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

Here at SGUL, we support open access via our institutional repository, SORA, which holds over 6000 full text articles by SGUL researchers past and present, with more articles being made available every day. And open research isn’t just about articles – we also support open research via our Research Data Repository, which can host not only research data, but also source code, poster presentations and more. Take a look at these recent posts from our Research Data Support Manager to learn more about managing your research data and using the Research Data Repository:

• Focus on Figshare: using ‘collections’ and ‘projects’
• DMPOnline for St George’s University researchers

We’ve also signed up for a number of read and publish deals, which allow SGUL staff and students to both read content in these publishers’ journals and publish open access in them with no additional costs (subject to eligibility criteria). See our webpages for a full list of our deals, along with further information on eligibility and how to access them.

Several well known research funders have launched open publishing platforms, where researchers they fund can publish their results quickly and without direct cost for publication. These include:

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Gates Open Research
• European Commission (Horizon 2020): Open Research Europe
• National Institute for Health Research: NIHR Open Research
• Wellcome: Wellcome Open Research
• Association of Medical Research Charities: AMRC Open Research

These platforms also allow for open peer review – to bring greater transparency and diversity to the peer review process. Registering for the ORCID open identifier enables you to showcase peer reviewing work you have undertaken.

Want to get involved?

Here’s some things to think about to help make research more open:

• For SGUL researchers with access to CRIS, upload your accepted manuscripts via the CRIS so they can be made open access in SORA (and encourage your colleagues to do the same).
• Consider whether you could publish via an open research platform, and consider who is invited to peer review (for instance, Wellcome Open Research encourages discussion with the editorial team to help with diversity of reviewers).
• Think about other research outputs you could make available on the SGUL data repository: e.g. datasets, protocols, code, posters and presentations.
• If you’re on the editorial board for any journals, can you advocate for reduced embargo periods, lower APCS or APC waiver policies for researchers with no source of funding?
• Join the conversation via the twitter hashtag #OAWeek – or start a conversation with your colleagues in person!

Any questions? Get in touch with us:

• sora@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about the CRIS and making your research publications available via SORA)
• openaccess@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about publishing open access)
• researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about research data and other types of research output)

We look forward to hearing from you.

Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant

Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

Liz Stovold, Research Data Support Manager

Focus on Figshare: using ‘collections’ and ‘projects’

This post has been written by Liz Stovold, Research Data Support Manager and Information Specialist, Cochrane Airways.

What is Figshare?

Figshare provides the infrastructure for the St George’s Research Data Repository. The repository facilitates the discovery, storage, citing and sharing of research data produced at St George’s. It is possible to store and share a range of research outputs in the repository including datasets, posters, presentations, reports, figures, and data management plans. Each item that is published via the repository receives a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which makes it easy to cite, share and promote your work.

What is a collection?

One of the features of Figshare is the ability to create a citable collection of individual related items. You can choose to publish a collection publicly, or opt to keep it private. Collections can be added to over time and republished as they are updated with new items. There are several advantages to using collections, such as the ability to group themed research outputs together in one place, and to showcase a portfolio of work.  

Here at SGUL, Cochrane Airways – a research group based in the Population Health Research Institute – decided to create a collection of the posters and presentations that they have produced over a number of years. A Figshare collection enables the Group to showcase and cite their research dissemination activities and share with funders and other stakeholders. It also provides them with one place to store these outputs instead of saving them across a variety of shared and personal drives.

What is a ‘project’?

A Figshare ‘project’ also enables researchers to group together related items, but it differs from a collection in that it allows multiple collaborators to contribute and to add notes and comments. You can choose to make your project public or keep it private. The project itself doesn’t have a DOI, but the items within a project can do. A project can contain a mix of publicly available data and private data visible only to the project collaborators.  

Cochrane Airways are piloting a Figshare project to store, share and publish reports and other documents that have been produced as part of their priority setting work. A project hosted on Figshare allows them to collate the output of their ongoing work, share documents within their group, and publish documents with a DOI as and when needed.

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Could a collection or project in Figshare be useful for you or your team? Contact the SGUL RDM Service at researchdata@sgul.ac.uk to discuss your needs, or see SGUL Research Data Management for more general information and guidance.

New Read and Publish deals for 2021

Since last year’s announcements, SGUL Library has expanded our number of “Read and Publish” deals, giving SGUL researchers even more opportunities to publish open access – this year we have new arrangements with publishers such as Oxford University Press, BMJ Publishing and Cambridge University Press, in addition to others such as Springer and Wiley.

Under these Read and Publish deals, open access fees for publishing original research in many journals from participating publishers are waived.

The deals are called read and publish because the institution has paid for SGUL staff and students to have access to read articles in the subscription journals covered, PLUS, where the SGUL researcher is the corresponding author, research articles can be published under a Creative Commons licence at no extra cost. This is visualised below:

To be eligible to publish open access, you’ll need to be the corresponding author on the paper, and either a member of St George’s, University of London staff, or a student at St George’s, University of London. You’ll be expected to use your SGUL affiliation on any articles where the fee is waived under this scheme. Guidance on acknowledging affiliation is contained in SGUL’s Research Publications Policy.

Corresponding authors who are members of St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust staff with honorary status at SGUL won’t normally qualify for these deals, although if the paper acknowledges a UK funder and a co-author with a relevant grant is based at SGUL, the paper may still qualify – please contact us for further advice.

As well as increasing the opportunities for SGUL researchers to make their research openly available, these deals will also help researchers to comply with funder mandates to publish open access (a CC-BY licence will usually be the one to select for funded research papers).

Which publishers are included in these new deals?

• BMJ Publishing, including titles such as Archives of Disease in Childhood, Gut, Heart and Sexually Transmitted Infections (your research must be acknowledging one or more specific UK funders to qualify). Note: This deal does not include open access waivers for publishing in the BMJ, or wholly open access titles.
• Cambridge University Press, including titles such as British Journal of Psychiatry, Cardiology in the Young, Epidemiology & Infection and Twin Research and Human Genetics.
• Oxford University Press, including titles such as Brain, Clinical Infectious Diseases, European Heart Journal, Human Molecular Genetics, Journal of Infectious Diseases and Virus Evolution.
• The American Physiological Society, including titles such as American Journal of Physiology – Cell Physiology and American Journal of Physiology – Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology. Researchers will also be eligible for a one year APS membership.

See our webpages for further information on the publishers and journals included in these deals, and information on how to apply.

Image by Bartek Zakrzewski from Pixabay

Open Research Platforms

As well as these opportunities to publish open access, a growing number of funders are providing open research platforms for researchers to publish the results of their research rapidly. These include:

• AMRC Research, for research funded by some of the medical charities that make up the Association of Medical Research Charities (a full list of participating charities is included in their FAQs).
• Gates Open Research, for research which has been funded or co-funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
• Open Research Europe, for research stemming from Horizon 2020 funding.
• Wellcome Open Research, for research funded or co-funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Are you funded by the Wellcome Trust?

If you are funded by the Wellcome Trust, remember that their open access policy has changed for journal articles submitted from 1^st January 2021. All original, peer reviewed research articles funded by the Wellcome Trust and submitted from this date must be made freely available via PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC by the final publication date, and must be published under a CC BY license (unless Wellcome has agreed to the use of a CC BY-ND license).

The following statement must be included on original, peer reviewed research articles funded by Wellcome and submitted from 1^st January 2021:

“This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.”

This rights retention strategy, developed by cOAlition S, will allow Wellcome funded authors to publish in their choice of journal, while also complying with the Wellcome Trust’s new open access policy.

COAlition S have also produced this graphic to explain the rights retention strategy.

For more information on Wellcome’s open access policy, have a look at our Library web page setting out the key points you need to know.

Questions?

Contact us at openaccess@sgul.ac.uk

Or see our Open Access FAQs webpage

Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant

Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

Open Access Week 2020: Open with Purpose

This week, October 19^th-25^th, is Open Access Week, an annual, international event dedicated to celebrating and promoting Open Research.

This year’s theme is Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion, acknowledging that current systems are often built on a past of historic injustices and that in building new systems, we need to be mindful of who we are and aren’t including, who we are prioritising and whether we are perpetuating a legacy of injustice.

To find out more, visit www.openaccessweek.org, or follow the official twitter hashtag, #OAWeek. We’ll also be tweeting and retweeting from the library account, @sgullibrary, and, if you’re in the library, look out for our poster on how to find open access material.

You can also find posts we’ve made in previous years under the Open Access Week tag on this blog.

Here at SGUL we support open research via our Research Publications Repository (SORA) and our Research Data Repository. We currently have over 4870 full text papers available via SORA, with an average 4180 downloads a month, and these numbers are rising every day. And, since its launch three years ago, we’ve had 17,163 downloads of public content in our Research Data Repository.

As well as supporting SGUL researchers to make their publications openly available via SORA, the Library is also signing up to Read and Publish deals, several of which are new in 2020. These deals work by giving SGUL patrons access to read journals, and giving SGUL corresponding authors the opportunity to publish original research articles on open access, as visualised below:

(from our blogpost on our Read and Publish deals)

Research outputs that aren’t traditional publications, such as research data, source code, poster presentations and so on, can be uploaded to our Research Data Repository, where they will be preserved and, where appropriate, made available for other researchers to explore and re-use. The Research Data Repository has been updated recently – have a look at our blog post from last week to find out more.

If you’d like to know more about SORA or about our Research Data Repository, please get in touch at sora@sgul.ac.uk (for SORA) or researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for the Research Data Repository, or for general help managing your data throughout the research lifecycle).

Want to get involved?

Here are some ways to consider making your research practices more open:

• Upload your author’s accepted manuscripts to a repository such as SORA: this means that, publisher copyright permitting, we will be able to make them available to people who might not otherwise have been able to access them. You can do this via your CRIS profile at http://cris.sgul.ac.uk/ – if you have any questions, you can contact us at sora@sgul.ac.uk
• Get in touch with researchdata@sgul.ac.uk about making your other research outputs openly accessible via our Research Data Repository, or for ideas on where to find open data and other outputs you can use in your own research.
• Think about uploading a preprint of your research to a preprint server. Posting papers to preprint platforms has increased greatly since the start of the pandemic – you can find out more about preprints, such as what they are and what to consider before posting, by reading our blogpost from last year on preprints in the medical, biological and health sciences.
• Follow the conversation via the twitter hashtag #OAWeek – and add your own thoughts and reflections!

Any questions? Get in touch with us:

• sora@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about the CRIS and making your research publications available via SORA)
• openaccess@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about publishing open access)
• researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about research data and other types of research output)

We look forward to hearing from you.

Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager

Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant

Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

The Changing Face of Peer Review

To coincide with Peer Review Week Sept 16-20, this is an overview on current developments in peer review, with some thoughts on the future, and information on how Library Services can offer support to our researchers.

What is peer review and why is it important?

Peer review is the process by which scholarly work is submitted to the scrutiny of other experts in the same field. It’s thought to date back to the seventeenth century¹, but has become increasingly standardised since the mid twentieth century². It’s now an important part of the scholarly publications process, helping to assess and improve research papers before formal publication. A report published last year by Publons³ (part of Clarivate Analytics) found that peer review was overwhelmingly valued by researchers. There are different models of peer review, such as blind review (where authors and reviewers may not be known to each other) through to more open models of reviewing (see below, fig 2 in the Publons report)³.

Why is there a “peer review crisis”?

Peer review is far from perfect, however. Research that contains errors or fraud isn’t always picked up, and reviewers aren’t always objective: unconscious bias can affect peer review⁴, and even double blind reviewing isn’t always completely anonymous, especially in smaller fields where reviewers are more likely to be able to identify authors based on topic or writing style. Peer review also often goes unrewarded: reviewers are not usually paid for their work, and researchers may not cite this work as part of their scholarly profile when applying for jobs or promotions.

Recent research in PLoS One has also suggested that some reviewers can lazily accept low-quality manuscripts, bringing down the overall quality of research⁵.   That the website Retraction Watch exists highlights that peer review does not always fulfil the functions expected.

How is the open research agenda changing peer review?

Open peer review refers to a variety of different models that broadly support the principles of open research. The features of these models might include:

• Named, identifiable reviewers.
• Reviews that are published alongside the final article.
• Participation by the wider community as opposed to just a small number of invited reviewers, whether on pre-review manuscripts or on the final version.
• Direct discussion between authors and reviewers.
• Reviews taking place on a different platform to publication⁶.

The different models have in common a desire to improve the peer review process, making it more transparent, accountable and accessible⁷.

Recent research has found that publishing peer review reports doesn’t compromise the review process, though only 8.1% of reviewers were willing to publish their identity alongside the report⁸.

Peer reviewing data

Data sharing has exploded in recent years. It is becoming commonplace in the academic publication process in light of the huge volumes of data being created in research and the challenges of irreproducible research. But while data sharing is becoming routine, peer review of data underlying publications is not always common.

Leading the way in data peer review are data journals. Data journals specialise in publishing descriptions of high value scientific datasets or analyses/meta-analyses of existing datasets. Submissions to data journals are peer-reviewed.

Other journals are quickly catching up. Peer reviewers may be asked to appraise the data underlying any publication, not just data-focused papers. Journals may have their own guidance for assessing datasets but PLOS provides some very practical criteria:

1. Is the data accessible?
2. Can you tell what you’re looking at?
3. Does the data you see match the data referenced in the manuscript?
4. Does the presentation of the data make sense?
5. Does the data itself make sense?

The SGUL research data management service can help you to prepare your data for sharing and peer review. Contact us at researchdata@sgul.ac.uk for more information.

What might drive developments in the future to improve peer reviewing – for researchers, and for science?

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment of 2012, commonly known as DORA, and to which St George’s University of London is a signatory, sets out a statement of intent and some guiding principles around a move away from a narrow set of metrics such as journal impact factor as a measure of assessment. Acknowledging that researchers may undertake a wide range of scholarly activities, and produce outputs other than journal articles, could lead to better recognition of and reward for peer reviewing.

In 2017, the DOI provider Crossref announced that they would now support registering peer reviews as well as other types of research outputs⁹. Other services such as Publons and ORCiD^10,11 also offer ways for researchers to track and get credit for their reviews, where these reviews are openly available¹².  

Given the known problems with peer review, and the growing number of manuscript submissions, it’s no surprise that as noted by Nature¹³, publishers are starting to employ Artificial Intelligence to try and improve those processes that can be automated – without taking away from decision making by human editors. For example, Frontiers journals have announced the use of AI to help with quality control and reviewer identification¹⁴.

While as the Publons report finds, “the scholarly community lacks a robust measure of review quality”, more openness of the peer reviewing process, and wider use of identifiers to link reviewers and their reviews, could enable more analysis and agreement of what constitutes good peer review.

In conclusion, new technologies, publishing models and funder mandates present opportunities for the scientific community to improve the peer review process – a process which at its best allows researchers to engage in a constructive dialogue to improve research and the communication of research findings.

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References

1. Tennant JP, Dugan JM, Graziotin D et al. (2017) A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review [version 3; peer review: 2 approved]. F1000Research, 6:1151 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.12037.3)

2. Ware M. Peer review: benefits, perceptions and alternatives. Publishing Research Consortium. 2008; p. 6. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.214.9676&rep=rep1&type=pdf [accessed 12/09/19]

3. Publons (2018) Global state of peer review https://doi.org/10.14322/publons.GSPR2018 [accessed 12/09/19]

4. Meadows, A (2018), “Eight Ways to Tackle Diversity and Inclusion in Peer Review” The Scholarly Kitchen. Available at https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/13/eight-ways-to-tackle-diversity-and-inclusion-in-peer-review/ [Accessed 12/09/19]

5. D’Andrea R, O’Dwyer JP (2017) “Can editors save peer review from peer reviewers?” PLoS ONE 12(10): e0186111. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0186111 [accessed 12/9/19]

6. Ross-Hellauer, T (2017), “What is open peer review? A systematic review” [version 2; peer review: 4 approved]. F1000Research, 6:588 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.2) (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.1)

7. Ross-Hellauer, T (2017), “Open peer review: bringing transparency, accountability and inclusivity to the peer review process”, LSE Impact Blog. Available at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/09/13/open-peer-review-bringing-transparency-accountability-and-inclusivity-to-the-peer-review-process/ [accessed 12/09/19]

8. Bravo, G; Grimaldo, F; López-Iñesta, E; Mehmani, B; Squazzoni, F (2019), “The effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals”, Nature Communications 10:322 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-08250-2

9. Lin, J (2017), “Peer reviews are open for registering at Crossref”. Available at: https://www.crossref.org/blog/peer-reviews-are-open-for-registering-at-crossref/ [accessed 12/09/19]

10. ORCID Support (2019), Peer Review https://support.orcid.org/hc/en-us/articles/360006971333-Peer-Review

11. PLOS Blog (2019), You’ve completed your review – now get credit with ORCID  https://blogs.plos.org/plos/2019/06/youve-completed-your-review-now-get-credit-with-orcid/ [accessed 16/09/2019]

12. Tennant, JP (2018), “The state of the art in peer review”, FEMS Microbiology Letters, Volume 365, Issue 19, fny204, https://doi.org/10.1093/femsle/fny204

13. Heaven, D (2018), “AI peer reviewers unleashed to ease publishing grind”, Nature 563, 609-610 (22 Nov 2018) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07245-9

14. Frontiers, Science News (2018) AI-enhanced peer review: Frontiers launches next generation of efficient, high-quality peer review Dec 14 2018; https://blog.frontiersin.org/2018/12/14/artificial-intelligence-peer-review-assistant-aira/