A new model for scientific publication

In an article titled "Post-publication peer review: opening up scientific conversation", the inventors of and original advocates for open access now propose a radically new model of “publish first and then referee openly later” system.

Faculty of 1000 (F1000 London) where the author of this article belongs to, its remit is to work with named experts to identify and recommend the most interesting papers published across different subject areas in biology and medicine.

Quoting the article, "Open access removes barriers for readers. Open, post-publication refereeing removes barriers for readers and authors alike, and it refocuses the role of peer review from, at its worst, a behind-the-scenes variety of censorship to, at its best, the process of expert criticism and advice that has always been its core and upon which the progress of science depends".



What I liked most about the proposed model is its in-built efficiency than the one in existence.

• Following the best papers in given area of research becomes easier, since review comments  associated with all articles are available openly along with the name of the reviewer. Further this ensures that the reviewers' time and effort does not just go waste, rather it will be highly valued as we can know the thoughts of experts on the articles of our interest.
• Similar to the way an equity share or a commodity discovers its true market value in open and free economy (one without barriers), likewise in this proposed open access and open review model, the true value of every publication is discovered collectively by the research community in an efficient manner. The number of citations and actual reviews obtained reflects the value rather than impact factor / eigen factor of the journal in which it is published.
• All articles try to discover their best value through repeated submissions starting with highly qualified journals and then lower until when it eventually gets accepted for publication, in due course wasting the time and effort of all the reviewers involved many times over. This inefficiency is resolved in the proposed model, and the whole community gains as review time spent per article significantly goes down w.r.t. the current situation, since all articles are published (if it is good science) and the value is discovered later in an ingenious manner.
• Such repeatedly submitted articles might not be bad science, but uninteresting in approach or their results, or they may be trivial / incremental research as well. And all these have their own place in science as long as they are not bad science. So even people into such incremental science save time as this ensures no repeated submissions many times over.
• Further, researchers will be less inclined to submit papers which constitute bad science, given that all revisions / versions of the article along with the review comments are openly available, and that would not be good for a researcher's credibility. So less time spent on reviewing junk papers.
• Given the in-built open access model in this proposed method. Articles are freely available for readers while more readers per article for researchers. So it is a win-win for everyone (except maybe the current publishers who need to find a new role for themselves in this proposed model).

I sincerely hope this model is adopted in other areas of science as well.

Read the original article here:
Hunter J (2012), "Post-publication peer review: opening up scientific conversation", Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 6:63. doi: 10.3389/fncom.2012.00063. http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2012.00063/full