Editors want to improve accountability while minimizing discrimination and errors in study.
By allowing scholars to pre-publish their studies for peer review, a new open evaluation technique called MetaROR aims to reform the “broken” peer assessment educational printing process.
Kathryn Zeiler, editor-in-chief at MetaROR and professor of law at Boston University, just told The College Fix more about the incentive for the online app, which launched in the fall.
She and her brother readers have a goal of “helping experts regain command of the publishing process,” she told The Fix in a new message.
” For example, under our assessment model, we ( the researchers, as opposed to the publishers ) get to choose when to issue statements of prudence when mistakes are discovered, and authors are given an opportunity to correct errors and release revised types”, Zeiler said.
Zeiler and her brother editors want to make the peer review process easier for both consumers and researchers of scientific research.
” And we know peer review, however much it is lauded, often does not work. It is sometimes biased, and too often allows mistakes, or even intellectual scam, to crawl through”, she and other reporters Stephen Pinfield and Ludo Waltman wrote recently in an essay at The Conversation.
” Clearly the peer-review system is broken. It is slow, inefficient and burdensome, and the incentives to carry out a review are low”, they wrote.
They described the operation of their new system:
Authors give MetaROR a link to their preprinted article by providing it with their work. A managing editor then recruits peer reviewers who are experts on the article’s object of study, its research methods, or both. When possible, reviewers with competing interests are excluded, and disclosure of competing interests is required.
Open reviews serve as a means of fostering scholarly conversations as well, and researchers gain from openly reviewing other people’s academic papers, they wrote.
The editors also want to make peer review more transparent, easing pressures from the publish-or-perish mindset. Zeiler claimed that researchers with their system can choose how much to write and publish independently, without being under “pressure to sacrifice quality to improve quantity in an effort to increase publisher profits.”
What’s more,” MetaROR is a solution for long publication delays due to multiple rounds of revisions”, Zeiler informed The Fix.
Open reviews allow authors to respond, interact, and engage with edits. ” In addition, editors strive to locate reviewers with no competing interests”, Zeiler said.
We have committed to giving metarearchers full access to our data in exchange for their new system, according to their new system. This will help us refine our procedure and discover its advantages and disadvantages, she said.
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Ivan Oransky, a medical journalist and co-founder of Retraction Watch, added that one of the issues with academic publishing is that students frequently feel pressured to publish. His blog reports on academic retractions for various reasons, including errors and plagiarism.
” People are being pressured”, Oransky told The Fix in a Zoom interview focused on academic publishing. ” They have to publish too much, and they have to publish in certain journals. If you take away that pressure, then people can be more relaxed. And they won’t be motivated to “make things up” or” cut corners”
However, in a follow up email asking about open review platforms like MetaROR, Oransky told The Fix that “reducing retractions shouldn’t be a high-priority goal right now, in my view. A higher priority should be given to retracting old documents.
” And at most MetaROR can prevent a tiny number of retractions. The field it’s involved in is very small, and populated by researchers who already scrutinize one another’s work more than in a lot of other fields, or at least that’s their ethos, “he said.
There are also a few other open review platforms. Oransky cited an eLife initiative that “helps” scientists accelerate discovery by providing a platform for research communication that promotes and recognizes the most responsible behaviors in science.
The eLife platform focuses on STEM research, while MetaROR welcomes” articles in all fields of metaresearch.”
In the meantime, the editors at MetaROR want to promote fresh academic discourse by creating a publishing environment that is accessible to students and non-established academics.
Zeiler told The Fix that MetaROR” welcome]s ] student engagement. First, students are welcome to submit articles for review. Second, students occasionally take part in the review process because we welcome co-authored reviews ( sometimes faculty members invite students to co-author reviews ).
” Students might also be interested in studying MetaROR’s review system. Any information or other information that would make this possible would be provided would be gratefully accepted. She said that we might consider inviting students to help us with some of our quality control measures, such as plagiarism and error checks.
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