In preparation for Peer Review Week (next week), here’s a nice primer on the current state of peer review from the authors at TSK (see below link). For additional reading, click on the search icon at the top of the Scholarly Kitchen website and type in “peer review” (https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/?s=peer+review)---lots of good critiques you’ll be hard-pressed to find by wading through Google, like Kent Anderson’s 2010 piece on the essential ingredients of peer review: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/03/30/improving-peer-review-lets-provide-an-ingredients-list-for-our-readers/.
Best,
Glenn
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Date & Time: Sep 21, 2020 at 4pm GMT/UTC, 5pm WAT, 6PM CAT/SAST, 7pm EAT
Confirmed speakers
Target audience: Researchers, librarians, journal editors and other interested academics as well as non-academic individuals including journalists.
What are the new technologies for research quality assessment in academic publishing in the light of Open Science?
Description
As a contribution to Peer Review Week 2020, TCC Africa and AfricArXiv have organised a webinar to take a deep dive into new technological developments towards Rapid and Open Peer Review. More than 300 publications (preprints and journal articles) are available online describing COVID-19 Research in and about Africa(https://www.scienceopen.com/collection/COVID19_Africa). What are the procedures to assess these studies for accuracy and coherence so that journalists, policy makers and interested individuals can learn from them and combat the virus?
Questions that will be addressed during the webinar include:
About Peer Review Week
Peer Review Week is a yearly global event celebrating the essential role that peer review plays in maintaining scientific quality. The event brings together individuals, institutions, and organizations committed to sharing the central message that good peer review, whatever shape or form it might take, is critical to scholarly communications.
Peer Review Week 2020 is taking place September 21 – 25, dedicated to the theme of “Trust in Peer Review”, shining a light on how the peer review process works and why it helps build trust in research.
Read more at https://peerreviewweek.wordpress.com/
Thanks Johanna, and thanks for sharing this link.
Rapid peer review is an interesting concept---I’d like to hear what Stephanie Dawson and your other speakers have to say. Normally, good and rapid are mutually exclusive requirements---you can have good peer review, or rapid “review” (though not necessarily what we understand as “peer review”), but not good AND rapid.
Of course, “peer review” doesn’t have a set definition; also, our expectations for it aren’t moored in reality right now---especially when there’s a fire hose of research findings to evaluate in a crisis---so in a sense we’re shifting the goal posts to fit our new normal when we say we can have good and rapid review: We’re either changing our expectations (doing only cursory quality checks, for instance, and not robust critiques of methods and conclusions plus revisions), or changing the expertise of these review (allowing non-experts to do these critiques), or changing the formats (allowing open reviews instead of blind or better), and so on.
All this said, study after study has shown that even though researchers think “peer review” (writ large) is important, it really doesn’t help improve the quality of science (as measured in terms of retractions). And the jury is still out on whether open reviews are any less effective than blind reviews (despite double-blind being a worthy standard, as Robert Harrington notes in today’s TSK). So---maybe there’s nothing to worry about here. Time will tell. The innovation and exploration happening at the cutting edge of peer review (as you’ll be showcasing) is critically important for developing new best practices.
Thanks again for sharing and best regards,
Glenn
Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/osi2016-25/16F39F1C-D723-4B4D-B987-3DD1E8A9B300%40gmail.com.