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By Cathleen O’Grady
Some scholarly publishers have already outsourced operations such as editing and printing copies. Now, 15 journals outsource something central to science itself: the peer review process. Journals, which include BMJ Open Science and Royal Society Open Science, say they will accept peer-reviewed articles from a non-profit community.
This is the first time the journals have guaranteed that they will accept the recommendations of another body without further analysis, says Chris Chambers, a scientific neurologist 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 for free to authors and magazines – will add to the existential questions magazines face, says Jason Hoyt, CEO of PeerJ, a family of open access magazines that signed up for the initiative. “What do you pay to make publishers, exactly?” he asks. For PeerJ, which is committed to paying low publishing fees, outsourcing peer review provides an opportunity to innovate, he says.
PCI RR launches today and is funded with about 5,500 euros in donations from universities and scientific societies for start-up costs and its first year, says 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: recorded reports, which are detailed plans of questions and experimental methods, submitted for peer review before starting a research project. If the researchers follow the peer review plan of the registered report and get results, the articles that appear can be published in any of the 15 “PCI RR-friendly” journals, regardless of the importance of the results. Authors can take their manuscripts elsewhere if the results are striking enough to be published in a high-impact journal, says Emily Sena, editor-in-chief of BMJ Open Science and co-founder of PCI RR. Or authors can choose to publish the newspaper – along with the PCI RR recommendation – as a prepress, completely bypassing the journal system, says Logan.
Sena says BMJ, the editor of his journal, was enthusiastic – and the PCI RR criteria for research quality and transparency matched the requirements of his journal. The agreement does not commit the journal to publishing only anything going through PCI RR; it should be an appropriate topic for the journal and tick other boxes, such as signing peer reviews. PCI RR publishes reviews, but does not require reviews to sign them.
The new venture joins a range of “peer-to-peer communities” such as Peer Community In Ecology and Peer Community In Paleontology. Those communities offer a free peer review of preprints, with published reviews and letters of recommendation for papers that are not accepted, as a way for researchers to signal the quality of their work – and keep it free to read – without using Traditional journals or open pay – access publishing fees. PCI RR says it will accept submissions from science, medicine, social sciences and humanities. The goal, Chambers says, is for PCI RR to become a “clearing house” for recorded reports.
It’s a promising idea, says Lisa Rasmussen, an ethics researcher at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Like journals, PCI RR will rely on scientists to provide volunteer work. This could make it difficult to maintain a diverse group of reviewers and maintain sustainable workloads as the project grows, says Rasmussen. But the project has a “chutzpah”, she says – and with its detailed public guidelines, the publication of peer reviews and the emphasis on open data, will contribute to better transparency and accessibility of the publication.
To date, peer-to-peer communities have cost around € 5,300 a year, with funding mainly from universities and academia. But PCI RR, with its interdisciplinary focus and ambition to bring more journals on board, can become more expensive. Logan says the founders are thinking of ways to keep the project sustainable. In the long run, she says, PCI RR may need to raise funds to hire administrative staff – although the team is committed to volunteering for the main review work.
Hoyt says other projects have tried to place parts of peer review outside of scientific journals, but none of them have gained much ground, possibly due to a lack of incentives for researchers to use them. He believes that PCI RR offers attractions: in addition to providing a guarantee of close publication in a number of journals, it provides valuable feedback at the most useful stage, research planning.
But with PCI RR performing all the steps involved in peer review, publishers will have to prove their worth, says Hoyt. He says publishers still operate platforms that attract readers and do important work for formatting articles so that they can be aggregated by PubMed and other databases. “There’s still a role for publishers to play,” he says, “but I think they’ll have to start justifying the prices they charge.”