Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of what peer reviewing is about. The role, function, and importance of peer reviewing in science are succinctly described. The apparent advantages of the peer reviewing process and its main flaws are presented. In addition, novel trends that improve the current practice of peer reviewing are sketched. After having read this chapter, a reader should be familiar with the purpose of peer reviewing, be able to understand its current functioning, assess its strengths and weaknesses, as well as reflect on recent attempts to enhance the process.
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Notes
- 1.
Exceptions are proposal reviews, as, e.g., organized by the European Commission that usually foresee in some form of financial compensation for the time and travel (if applicable) spent.
- 2.
The Council of the EU has endorsed the European Research Area Roadmap (http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-1208-2015-INIT/en/pdf) adopted by the European Research Area and Innovation Committee that explicitly promotes the application of international peer reviewing as an important instrument for an effective national research system (priority 1): ERAC 1208/15, p. 6, 20/04/2015.
- 3.
Reviewers might fear that their submissions might be negatively evaluated by authors of submissions rejected by the reviewers if the authors know their identity.
- 4.
An exception are project proposal review sessions or project progress evaluations for which reviewers are compensated for—e.g., by the European Commission—as it takes up quite some time from the reviewers.
- 5.
In all fairness, chairs or editors inviting reviewers they are acquainted with is not a problem “per se” as the chair or editor knows the expertise and reliability of these reviewers better compared to other unknown reviewers.
- 6.
The Semantic Web Journal (http://www.iospress.nl/journal/semantic-web/) is a good exemplar of these novel venues.
- 7.
- 8.
The LNCS Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming only accepts submissions that have been reviewed during a writers’ workshop.
- 9.
A step further could be to publish papers as blog entries with moderated discussion threads associated with each paper. Only registered subscribers have access to the information and are allowed to post reactions (reader commentary). Citation impact could be measured by the number of clicks on the paper (positive), reactions and references to it, etc.
- 10.
The alternative is “the green road to open access” (an author makes the publication available himself/herself) not requiring any payment by the author. More and more it is assumed that some public repository is set up (by a research field, by universities, by the government, etc.) and paid for. This “green access publication” (if the paper was originally published through the regular, commercial “closed” channel) has to respect a publication embargo for a certain period imposed by the commercial publisher.
- 11.
Have a look at http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ to know which open-access journals to avoid.
- 12.
For conferences, let alone workshops, this seems much more difficult (and probably much less worthwhile).
- 13.
Personal communication by Ralf Gerstner (Springer)
- 14.
- 15.
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Spyns, P., Vidal, ME. (2015). The Concept of “Peer Reviewing”. In: Scientific Peer Reviewing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25084-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25084-7_1
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