Open Peer Review

A model for overlay peer review on repositories is open for public comment

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COAR presents and makes available for public comment a new model for overlay peer review on repositories. This model is a significant step towards the development of a highly distributed architecture for overlay services that takes us beyond the current landscape with many silos, in which every organisation maintains its own separate system, to a decentralised, global, interoperable, scholarly infrastructure. The present work can scale, respond to different needs and priorities related to language, region, and discipline, and has the potential to liberate scholarly communication from the short-sighted interests of private groups and organisations.

Open access repositories start to offer overlay peer review services

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Open access repositories administered by Universities or research organizations are a valuable infrastructure that could support the transition to a more collaborative and efficient scholarly evaluation and communication system. Open Scholar has coordinated a consortium of six partners to develop the first Open Peer Review Module (OPRM) for institutional repositories. The module integrates an overlay peer review service, coupled with a transparent reputation system, on top of institutional repositories.

Developing the first Open Peer Review Module for Institutional Repositories

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Why aren’t articles on arXiv —or any other open access repository— formally credited as publications? What is it exactly that separates open access repositories from publishers? The simple answer is that publications in journals come with an amorphous quality indicator associated with the journal’s perceived prestige. Articles posted on a repository on the other hand, are considered to be “provided at the reader’s own risk”, as they are not accompanied by any measurable guarantee of their scientific merit. We think the time has come to change all that.

Academic self-publishing: a not-so-distant-future

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After a long delay, our debate article “Academic self-publishing: a not-so-distant future” finally appeared at Prometheus, a journal publishing critical studies in innovation. The journal issue hosting our article was originally expected in September 2013, but a series of unfortunate events resulted in an eight-month standoff between the journal’s editorial team and its publisher Taylor & Francis. In our paper we use an example to illustrate how academic self-publishing can already be implemented with the existing infrastructure.

Open Scholar at the OpenAIRE/COAR Joint Conference: “Open Access Movement to Reality: Putting Together the pieces”

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The OpenAIRE (//www.openaire.eu) / COAR (//www.coar-repositories.org) Joint Conference “Open Access Movement to Reality: Putting the Pieces Together” took place from the 21st -22nd of May, 2014 at the Acropolis Museum in Athens. The event was attended by about 150 people and was one of a series of events related to open access and linked open data organized by Greece during its 6-month presidency of the EU.

Beyond open access: facing academia’s real problems

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The slides for the talk Pandelis Perakakis gave on the 5th of December 2013 at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. The talk focuses on how the journal monopoly over three of the most basic processes in scholarly communication —validation, evaluation and dissemination— is creating problems even more important than the lack of accessibility to research output.

On the future of peer review: LIBRE presentation at SpotOn London 2013

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On Friday 8th of November, Open Scholar Co-founders Michael Taylor and Pandelis Perakakis gave a 5-minute talk on the future of academic peer review also presenting the forthcoming platform LIBRE at the SpotOn 2013 event. We post the transcription of the talk that summarizes our vision on the future of peer review and academic publishing in general.

Why and how to separate scholarly evaluation from academic journals.

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Today’s academic publishing system may be problematic, but many argue it is the only one available to provide adequate research evaluation. Pandelis Perakakis introduces an open community platform, LIBRE, which seeks to challenge the assumption that peer review can only be handled by journal editors. By embracing a new culture of open, transparent and independent research evaluation, the academic community can more productively contribute to global knowledge.