How can something exclusive, secretive, and irreproducible be considered to be objective? How can something exclusive, secretive, and irreproducible be considered as a ‘gold standard’ of any sort?
Traditional, closed peer review has these traits, but yet for some reason held in esteem as the most rigorous and objective standard of research and knowledge generation that we have. Peer review fails peer review, and its own test of integrity and validation, and is one of the greatest ironies of the academic world.
What we need is a new standard of peer review that is suitable for a Web-based world of scholarly communication. This is to help accommodate the increasingly rapid communication of research and new sources of information, and bring peer review out of the dark (literally) ages and into one which makes sense in a world of fast, open, digital knowledge dissemination.
What should a standard for peer review look like in 2017?
The big test for peer review, and any future version of it, is how does the scientific community apply its stamp of approval?
Continue reading “A new gold standard of peer review is needed”
A whole new year means a chance to start or continue building your profile as an Open Scientist! There are so many ways you can do this, from publishing Open Access and sharing your research data, to helping to teach students how to code or use GitHub. Every little bit helps.
Here are ten recommendations from us to kick-start the New Year with an Open Science bang!
- Update your ScienceOpen profile
- Get your author- and article-level metrics
- They’re all right there on your profile page
- They provide a great accompaniment to other ‘impact’ profiles such as with ImpactStory
- Get an ORCID account
- ORCID is an essential part of research infrastructure
- We use ORCID in multiple ways on our platform to make things easier for you
- Build a research collection for your community
- Use social media more – get it together!
- Social media is an essential part of a researcher’s toolkit
- Get on Twitter, start blogging, amplify your research!
- Upload your papers as pre- or post-prints
- Comment on or post-publication peer review an article
- Get an ImpactStory profile and tell your research story
- Get a Publons account for your pre- and post-publication peer reviews
- Get informed about Open Science developments at a global level
- Open Science is a vast and complex topic, see our Open Science Stars series for some context
- We all need to take the responsibility in making sure we understand why making our research more open is important, and how to go about doing this
Do you have any Open Science New Years resolutions? Let us know in the comments!
Full steam ahead with our incredible Open Science Stars! We hope you’ve been enjoying it so far, and today we’re bringing you Dasapta Erwin Irawan, a a researcher based in Indonesia at the interface between Engineering, Hydrogeology and Geoscience, and an avid open science supporter. Enjoy his story!
When did you first hear about ‘open science’? What was your first reaction, do you remember?
It’s kind of funny, I heard it first from you :). (Ed: *sniff*) It was one of your blog post in 2012 Relocation, and a chance to try some open science-ing that gave me ideas of sharing my results as fast as I can and as wide as I can. I had finished my PhD when I first read it and your posts on EGU blog. There I noticed your hash tags ‘#OpenPhD` then followed it. I wasn’t serious in using my Twitter handle for academic purposes back then. My first reaction was, to make all my published papers available online, posted them all on my ResearchGate account and my blog.
You have a very strong commitment to open science. What is it that drives this for you?
My strong commitment has been built by seeing so many other doing the same thing. In Indonesia, where not many universities have subscription to major journals, open science could be the answer of what we’ve been looking for. Everybody here keeps saying to submit papers to major paywalled journals, as they have good reputation and indexed by WoS or Scopus, while it should not be that way. What we need in Indonesia is to keep writing, write more in English and find a way to make it easier to be found and accessible by others, as if it was indexed by WoS and Scopus. And I see by using the latest free and open source services, we can do that.
In Indonesia, where not many universities have subscription to major journals, open science could be the answer of what we’ve been looking for
Continue reading “Dasapta Erwin Irawan: The state of Open Science in Indonesia and how to drive change to make research better for everyone”
It’s the most wondrous time of the year! Peer Review Week is the time when the scholarly communications community comes together to recognise the importance and value of peer review and peer reviewers.
This year, the theme is all about Recognising Review, and the valiant efforts of the research community in performing and managing peer review.
To celebrate this, and discuss the topic further, we will be holding a webinar on September 19th at 11AM GMT all about new and future approaches for acknowledging the peer review process.
Continue reading “The future of peer review is now!”
For the majority of scientists, peer review is seen as integral to, and a fundamental part of, their job as a researcher. To be invited to review a research article is perceived as a great honour due to its recognition of expertise, and forms part of the duty of a scientist to help progress research. However, the system is in a bit of a fix. With more and more being published every year and ever increasing demands on the time and funds of researchers, the ability to competently perform peer review is dwindling simply due to competition with other aspects of duty. Why, many researchers might ask, should they spend their valuable time reviewing others work for little to no recognition or reward, as is with the traditional model? Indeed, many publishers opine that the greatest value they add is through managing the peer review process, which in many cases is performed on a volunteer basis by academic Editors and referees, and estimated to cost around $1.9 billion in management per year. But who actually gets the recognition and credit for all of this work?
Continue reading “Credit given where credit is due”
