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By Cathleen O’Grady
Some scientific publishers have already outsourced activities such as editing and printing copies. Now 15 journals outsource something that is central to science itself: the peer review process. The magazines, including BMJ Open Science and Royal Society Open Science, say they accept articles rated by a non-profit peer community organization.
It is the first time that journals have guaranteed that they will accept another agency’s recommendations without further assessment, said Chris Chambers, a cognitive neuroscientist at Cardiff University and one of the founders of the peer-review organization called Peer Community In. Registered Reports. (PCI RR). The service – which PCI RR will provide to authors and magazines for free – will add to the existential questions that magazines face, said Jason Hoyt, CEO of PeerJ, a freely accessible family of magazines that have signed up for the initiative. “What exactly do you pay publishers for?” he asks. In front of PeerJ, which is committed to low cost of publishing, peer review outsourcing offers an opportunity to innovate, he says.
PCI RR launches today and is funded by approximately $ 5,500 in donations from universities and scientific societies for start-up costs and the first year, said co-founder Corina Logan, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The organization identifies volunteer experts to review only one type of journal article: registered reports, which are detailed plans of experimental questions and methods, submitted for peer review before the start of a research project. If researchers follow the peer-reviewed plan of the registered report and get results, the articles appearing in any of the 15 “PCI RR Friendly” journals can be published no matter how important the results are. Authors can still take their manuscripts elsewhere if the results are striking enough to be published in a major journal, said Emily Sena, editor-in-chief of BMJ Open Science and co-founder of PCI RR. Or authors can choose to publish the paper – along with PCI RR’s recommendation – as preprint, bypassing the journal system entirely, Logan says.
Sena says BMJ, the publisher of her journal, was enthusiastic – and PCI RR’s criteria for research quality and transparency matched her journal’s demands nicely. The agreement does not oblige the journal to publish just anything that goes through PCI RR; it should be an appropriate topic for the magazine and tick other boxes, such as signing peer reviews. PCI RR publishes assessments but does not require assessors to sign them.
The new company joins a series of existing peer communities such as Peer Community In Ecology and Peer Community In Paleontology. Those communities offer free peer review of preprints, with published reviews and letters of recommendation for papers that pass, as a way for researchers to indicate the quality of their work – and keep it readable – without using traditional journals or high open costs to pay. -access to publication costs. PCI RR says it will accept registered filed reports in science, medicine, social sciences and humanities disciplines. The goal, Chambers says, is for PCI RR to become a “clearinghouse” for registered reports.
It’s a promising idea, says Lisa Rasmussen, a research ethicist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Like magazines, PCI RR will rely on scientists to volunteer. That could make it difficult to maintain a diverse pool of reviewers and keep the workload sustainable as the project grows, Rasmussen says. But the project has “chutzpah,” she says – and with its detailed public guidelines, peer review publishing, and emphasis on open data, it will help make publishing more transparent and accessible.
So far, department-specific peer communities have cost around € 5,300 per year, with funding mainly from universities and academic associations. But PCI RR, with its multidisciplinary focus and ambition to bring more magazines on board, can get more expensive. Logan says the founders are thinking about ways to keep the project sustainable. In the long run, she says, PCI RR may need to raise money to hire administrative staff – though the team is committed to volunteering for the primary work of overhaul.
Hoyt says other projects have tried to move parts of peer review outside of scientific journals, but none have gained much ground, possibly due to a lack of incentive for researchers to use them. He believes that PCI RR offers temptations: in addition to offering a near-guarantee of publication in a range of journals, it provides valuable feedback in its most useful stage, research planning.
But now that PCI RR takes all the steps required in peer review, publishers will have to demonstrate their worth, Hoyt says. He says publishers still have platforms that draw readers, and they are doing an important job of formatting articles so that they can be aggregated by PubMed and other databases. “There is still a role for publishers,” he says, “but I think they have to justify the prices they charge.”