The rise of open peer review
In recent years there has been growing interest and adoption of open peer review in academic publishing. Open peer review offers the potential for greater accountability, inclusivity, and collaboration in scientific publishing through various transparent peer review practises such as open identities of reviewers and authors, publicly available peer review reports, and direct, interactive discussions between authors, reviewers, and even editors.
Several journals and publishing platforms have incorporated open peer review, including journal such as eLife and the Open Research Europe publishing platform. While switching to these platforms initially presented some challenges in terms of moving away from traditional prestige metrics such as impact factors, and as such, facing a decline in submissions at the end of 2024, these journals have shown that it possible to move beyond impact factors while maintaining quality and financial sustainability. In March this year, eLife published their 3-year update report on the publish-review-curate open peer review model. In the report they discuss how their publishing model has been fairing and outline exciting ways forward after receiving a £2.4 m investment from Wellcome in their eLife Pathways initiative to build open publishing infrastructure for the global research community.
Another recent preprint found that articles with public peer reviews are more cited (about 1.07 times more) and have fewer retractions (about 43% less over 6 years). All in all, open peer review seem to be boding well as a publishing model and will likely serve to improve the quality of scientific publications over time. Watch this space!
By Teresa Simoes Steyn