Is this a new dawn for scientific publishing?

Scientific publishing – it’s a rum old do isn’t it?

Bastions of academic excellence or vultures picking the bones of sub-standard science – whatever your thoughts on the peer review process, one thing we can all agree on is that something has to give.

Scientists have been saying that for years of course, and huge change has already been seen – open access, pre-print servers (arxiv.org, biorxiv.org), data only journals (gigasciencejournal.com, geosciencedata.com) – many new models have sprung up. Even piracy (SciHub.org, LibGen.io) is gaining an air of legitimacy against the backdrop of open scientific interest. But there is, as it were, no new gold standard. Many academics still favour the old model of high-impact ‘traditional’ journals, most of which are expensive – either to author or reader – and involve burdensome processes.

So which of the many and varied new paradigms will cause the levee to finally breach? Well, one interesting new idea is that journals simply don’t worry about the peer-review bit. That’s not to say peer-review is neglected – clearly that is the vital element here – it’s just that the publishing houses could, in essence, out-source it. As such the whole shebang is budded off and becomes someone else’s problem. This is a model developed by a clutch of Finnish academics who have recently set up the intriguingly innovative Peerage of Science.

This is a free service, they claim, for scientific peer review and publishing. In essence it is a holding area where academics can submit work to be reviewed by approved ‘peers’. These peers come from a community (…growing nicely it seems) associated with Peerage of Science, themselves scientists who have published a peer reviewed scientific article in an established international journal as first or corresponding author. They review the work, give feedback, then – if the authors so choose – they can re-upload the corrected work and participating journals can pick and choose from pre-peer reviewed articles ripe for the publishing.

Now, the natty bit here is that these reviewers get something out of this arrangement as well. By introducing something they call ‘peer-review-of-peer-review’, Peerage of Science can keep in check rouges whilst rewarding robust reviewers. A review, after all, is only worth as much as the reviewer giving it. It is in the interests of the ‘peers’ that they give honest, robust reviews – otherwise they’ll be called out by others in the community in the form of a ‘quality index’, awarded to each individual reviewer. This will be, say Peerage of Science, a reliable measure of their expertise in the scientific fields they operate in – and as such hold value for them.

This is peer review for a modern world. It takes the immediate feedback and rating model of Uber or eBay and applies it to academia. It is of course early days, but I think we could see 3rd party peer-review paradigms like this become very widespread. Indeed, it is an idea that is already gaining some ground – Peerage of Science has recently bagged its self a new partner in the shapely form of academic publishing giants Taylor & Francis.

So far so good – but could it go further? Could it tackle one of the most worrying aspects of scientific publishing – negative results? Publishers don’t like them, scientists struggle to find the time, or perhaps money, to attempt to get them published but they are, of course, vital. The monstrous amount of time wasted in replicating research that turns out to be null is almost entirely down to this publication bias.

Something akin to a free holding space where negative results could be sent, and reviewed – even if never published in a traditional sense – feels like a relatively achievable add-on for a site like Peerage of Science. And, if it is indexed sufficiently, a cursory search before any research work could save a lot of time, money and frustration.

So, take a look (www.peerageofscience.org), am I missing something or does this have a lot of potential? Let me know your thoughts at phil.prime@laboratorynews.co.uk

Phil Prime, Editor