This is a guest blog post by Liz Allen, VP of Marketing at ScienceOpen who have generously sponsored #openicecream for those attending their site demo on Thursday 17^th July from 3-3.30pm (when our collective blood sugar hits a low!)

If I am asked to write a blog post (including this one, for the Open Knowledge Festival which is a privilege), rather than staring at a blank page and fretting my way to inspiration, I like to find an open image that sums up the topic at hand and consider why it speaks to me.

Image credit – AJ Cann/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Whenever I think of the pre-publication peer-review process (the current norm in scientific publishing), I am always drawn to this picture for a couple of reasons:

1. The juxtaposition of the size of the researcher (larger) than the (smaller) article. While it is doubtless easier for those writing reviews to depersonalize the process by aiming their critiques at the article, this largely one-way feedback is ultimately directed at the corresponding author on behalf of a larger group. This makes the entire process inherently stressful.
2. All those “anonymous” eyes boring into the soul of the poor researcher (typically the identity of the reviewers is withheld from the author), which compounds the sense of isolation that is prevalent throughout traditional peer-review.

For those of us who seek to build a more just system of research communication, and there are a fair few at this excellent Festival, it seems that the balance of power between the different relationships in the current peer-review model is skewed. The needs of hard working researchers, who seek a rapid and constructive dialogue around their work, are currently last.

The scientific community frequently makes bleakly funny jokes about the pitfalls of peer-review. One of my favorite collections of hilarious review outtakes is BRFH (you can find out what this means by clicking the link!). Here's a good one to give you a flavor of the site “Your research agenda is so outdated that your results are on a Wikipedia page already.”

All the participants at this Festival value Open Access to knowledge, and ScienceOpen is no different. If I had to pinpoint our major intervention in scientific research and publishing, it would have to be the open post-publication peer-review process that we use.

At ScienceOpen, the new Open Access Research + Publishing network, we're all about challenging the status quo and making research, especially peer-review, work better by making it open and transparent. And we’re not alone in thinking this way, in case you thought we were intent on wreaking havoc in academia! Here are some quotes from leading individuals who have posted on this topic using our blog (which is open to all registered users to share their ideas):

“Peer-review as a tool of evaluation for research is flawed.” So said David Black, the Secretary General of the International Council for Science (ICSU) where he advocates for OA to scientific data and Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

And on the experience of peer-review and publishing with ScienceOpen: “It is exciting to get your data published in a few days and to receive the ideas/comments and reviews at the same time, as well as to get input from experts in the area and to improve your research continuously”. So said Nikos Karamanos, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Patras in Greece and charter member of our Editorial Board.

“Post-publication peer-review will be an intriguing experience, certainly not without pitfalls, but worth trying”. So said Martin Suhm, Professor of Physical Chemistry, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany and one of our first authors.

Here's a brief overview of how open post-publication peer-review works at ScienceOpen (SO):

1. Researchers use collaborative free workspace on SO to prepare manuscript
2. They decide to submit to SO (or they can choose to go elsewhere of course)
3. Four point internal check for importance, validity, completeness and comprehensibility
4. If to standard, publication within about a week with a DOI so article can be found and cited
5. Editors contact the reviewers suggested by the authors or they may ask others
6. Reviewers must have the status of Scientific or Expert Member (published at least five articles per ORCID ID)
7. Reviewers publicly record their thoughts on the article using inline annotation tools
8. All reviews and associated dialogue receive a DOI for contribution to the scientific debate
9. Authors can respond and healthy (we hope!) discussion ensues

I'd like to close by answering the question I posed in my headline “When all eyes are on research, who blinks first.” In a pre-publication peer-review world, I would argue that the researcher is the one blinking, frequently in disbelief at the length of time it takes to be reviewed and the oftentimes poor quality of the feedback received.

Our wish at ScienceOpen is that open post-publication peer-review will change the face of research communication forever and put control back in the hands of those whose painstaking labors created the work in the first place. This will additionally change the face of research evaluation, a process which has hitherto remained largely unchanged of benefit to science and society.

All power to the research community!