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By Cathleen O’Grady
Some scientific publishers have already outsourced publishing, such as editing and printing copies. Now 15 journals are contracting something central to science itself: the peer review process. The magazines, which include BMJ Open Science and Royal Society Open Science, says they will accept articles reviewed by a non-profit “peer community” organization.
This is the first time that magazines guarantee that they will accept the recommendations of another body without further investigation, says 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 will provide PCI RR to writers and magazines for free – will contribute to the existential questions that magazines face, says Jason Hoyt, CEO of PeerJ, a family with open access to magazines that have signed up for the initiative. “What exactly do your publishers pay for?” he asks. For PeerJ, dedicated to low publication fees, outsourcing peer review offers the opportunity to innovate, he says.
PCI RR is launched today and is funded by about € 5,500 in donations from universities and scientific societies for start-up costs and the first year, says 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, are submitted for peer review prior to the commencement of a research project. If researchers follow the peer-reviewed plan of the registered report and get results, the articles that appear can be published in any of the 15 “PCI RR-friendly” journals, 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 high-impact journal, says Emily Sena, editor-in-chief of BMJ Open Science and a co-founder of PCI RR. Or authors may choose to publish the article along with the recommendation of PCI RR as a pre-print, which completely bypasses the magazine system, Logan says.
Sena says BMJ, the publisher of her journal, was enthusiastic – and PCI RR’s criteria for research quality and transparency neatly match the requirements of her journal. The agreement is not bound to publish the journal just anything published by 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 reviewers to sign them.
The new venture joins a range of existing “peer communities”, such as Peer Community in Ecology and Peer Community In Paleontology. These communities offer free peer review of previews, with published reviews and letters of recommendation for successful papers, as a way for researchers to indicate the quality of their work – and keep it readable – without using or paying for traditional journals . access to publication fees. PCI RR says it will accept registered submissions in disciplines in science, medicine, social sciences and humanities. The goal, according to Chambers, is for PCI RR to become a clearing house for registered reports.
This is 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 provide volunteer labor. This can make it difficult to maintain a diverse pool of judges and keep workloads sustainable as the project grows, Rasmussen says. But the project has ‘chutzpah’, she says – and with its detailed public guidelines, publication of peer reviews and the emphasis on open data, it will help make publishing more transparent and accessible.
So far, the discipline-specific peer communities have cost about € 5,300 a year, with funding mainly from universities and academic associations. But PCI RR, with its interdisciplinary focus and ambition to bring more magazines on board, could 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 have to raise funds to hire administrative staff – although the team is committed to volunteering for the primary review work.
Hoyt says other projects have attempted to place parts of peer review outside journals, but none of them have gained much ground, possibly due to a lack of incentives for researchers to use them. He believes PCI RR offers attractions: in addition to providing almost a guarantee for publication in a range of journals, it provides valuable feedback in the most useful phase, research planning.
Since PCI RR takes all the steps involved in peer review, publishers will need to demonstrate their value, Hoyt says. He says publishers still operate platforms that attract readers, and they are doing important work to format articles so that they can be merged by PubMed and other databases. “There is another role that publishers have to play,” he says, “but I think they will have to start justifying the prices they charge.”