Ending #peerrevwk15 with a bang!

Just as with any British Firework display on the 5th of November (Guy Fawkes Night), we’ve saved the best until last!

Here at ScienceOpen we wear three hats: Publisher, Aggregator and Reformer and it’s in this final regard that we take the most pride.

Earlier this year, Jan Velterop, a thought leader in scholarly publishing, wrote to me and shared his proposal for Peer Review by Endorsement and wondered if ScienceOpen might be interested in making his long standing wish a reality.

No sooner had he written, but he found himself added to the Advisory Board and we announced our plans to add this process to our existing methodology (those with 5 or more Peer Reviewed publications per ORCID can become members of the network and review content).

Now, a few months later, for the first Peer Review Week, Jan has published a juicy Opinion (we publish all types of articles, not just original) with us entitled:

Peer Review – Issues, Limitations, and Future Development (currently available in Preview).

For our part, we have added instructions on how to publish this way to the site. Why do we like this idea? Because rather than publisher-mediated peer review before publication, the scientific community takes this role and the publisher verifies the results. As Jan puts it:

It is more efficient and cost effective to hand peer review entirely back to the scientific community, where it rightly belongs, than for publishers to find the right, appropriate, available, reliable, expert reviewers.

Whether you prefer to get your work professionally evaluated before you publish it and afterwards, or simply leave it all until after publication, the choice is yours and the choice is now (still time to try this process and get your paper published before the end of 2015!).