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Opinion: Peer review systems no longer guarantee academic rigor and a different approach is needed

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Peer review is a central function of academic research. This is the process by which research is finally published in an academic journal. Independent experts review the work of other researchers and recommend whether and how the work should be accepted by publishers and improved.

Peer reviews are often thought to guarantee quality, but in reality they don’t always work that well. Every academic has their own peer review horror story, from years of delays to multiple rounds of tedious revisions. This cycle continues until the paper is accepted somewhere or the author gives up.

On the other hand, the work of reviewing is voluntary and invisible. Peer reviewers, who are often anonymous, receive no compensation or recognition, even though their work is an essential part of research communication. Journal editors are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit reviewers.

And we know that peer review, no matter how much it is praised, often doesn’t work. At times there is bias and all too often errors and even academic fraud creep in.

It is clear that the peer review system is broken. It is time consuming, inefficient and burdensome, and there is low incentive to perform reviews.

publish first

In recent years, alternative methods of scrutinizing research have emerged that attempt to solve some of the problems with the peer review system. One is the “Publish, Review, Curate” model.

This reverses the traditional review-then-publish model. Papers are first published online and then peer-reviewed. Although this approach is too new to understand how it compares to traditional publishing, there is optimism about its future and that increased transparency in the review process will accelerate scientific progress. is suggested.

We have set up a platform for the field of meta-research (research about the research system itself) with a publication, review and curation model. Our aim is both to innovate peer review in our field and to study this innovation as a kind of meta-research experiment. This work will help us understand how to improve peer review and is expected to have implications for other research areas.

The platform, called MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review), has just been launched. This is a partnership between the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science, an academic organization, and the Institute for Research, a non-profit meta-research accelerator.

With MetaROR, authors first publish their work to a preprint server. Preprints are versions of research articles provided by authors prior to peer review as a way to promote dissemination of research. Preprints have been common in some academic fields for decades, but they have proliferated in others during the pandemic as a way to get science into the public domain faster. In fact, MetaROR builds a peer review service on a preprint server.

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Authors submit their work to MetaROR by providing MetaROR with a link to the preprinted article. The editor-in-chief then hires reviewers who are experts in the paper’s research topic, research methods, or both. Reviewers with competing interests will be excluded wherever possible, and disclosure of competing interests will be mandatory.

Peer reviews will be conducted publicly, and peer reviews will be published online. This makes the reviewer’s work visible and reflects the fact that the peer review report itself is a contribution to scholarly communication.

Although MetaROR still allows reviewers to choose whether or not to name themselves, reviewers increasingly see their role as participating in academic conversations as acknowledged participants. I hope that you will be able to do so. Our hope is that most reviewers will find it helpful to sign their reviews, and that this will greatly reduce the problem of anonymous reviews, negative reviews, and other malicious reviews. is.

Because papers submitted to MetaROR are already published, peer reviewers can focus on efforts to improve the paper. Peer review becomes a constructive process rather than a gatekeeping evaluation process.

Evidence suggests that there is actually surprisingly little difference between preprints and final papers, but improvements can often be made. The publish-review-curate model helps authors engage with reviewers.

After the peer review process, authors must decide whether and how to revise their paper. In the MetaROR model, authors can also choose to submit their papers to journals. To provide an efficient experience for authors, MetaROR works with several journals that are committed to using MetaROR reviews in their own peer review processes.

Like any publishing, reviewing, and curating platform, MetaROR is an experiment. To understand its successes and failures, it must be evaluated. We hope that others will too. That way, you can learn how best to organize the dissemination and evaluation of scientific research without too many peer review horror stories.

Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.conversation

Citation: Opinion: The peer review system no longer works to ensure academic rigor – a different approach is needed (November 23, 2024) https://phys.org/news/2024-11-opinion Retrieved from -peer- on November 23, 2024 longer academic rigor.html

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