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  • This week, we will identify some of the ways in which you can post open peer reviews, and complete the course by reflecting on the peer review process, especially reflecting on the assignments posted during the COPPHA peer review course.

    Part 1: Open reviews

    We have discussed the potential value open peer review, as well as some stated reservations. You might want to explore these in some more detail in this post from OpenAIRE which identifies seven traits of open peer review:

    • Open identities: Authors and reviewers are aware of each other's identity.

    • Open reports: Review reports are published alongside the relevant article.

    • Open participation: The wider community to able to contribute to the review process.

    • Open interaction: Direct reciprocal discussion between author(s) and reviewers, and/or between reviewers, is allowed and encouraged.

    • Open pre-review manuscripts: Manuscripts are made immediately available (e.g., via pre-print servers like ArXiv) in advance of any formal peer review procedures.

    • Open final-version commenting: Review or commenting on final “version of record” publications

    • Open platforms: Review is de-coupled from publishing in that it is facilitated by a different organizational entity than the venue of publication.

    We would like to draw your attention to the last point about open platforms. 

    PublishNow is a 'state-of-the-art scholarly publishing platform designed to streamline and enhance collaborative editing and comprehensive reviews.' It is part of the suite of open publishing opportunities, linked to COPPHA – we worked with the Baobab repository in the previous section of the course. The platform and has a section for posting open reviews of articles on Public Health. Each review will be given an ARK identifier. ARKs are a type of Digital Object Identifier (DOI) assigned to journal articles “Archival Resource Keys (ARKs) serve as persistent identifiers, or stable, trusted references for information objects. Among other things, they aim to be web addresses (URLs) that don’t return 404 Page Not Found errors. The ARK Alliance is an open global community supporting the ARK infrastructure on behalf of research and scholarship.”

    PublishNow is in its later stages of development, with major upgrades being implemented. We hope to provide a demonstration of its use during the week. Once officially launched and open for use, all COPPHA Open Publishing and Peer Review graduates, as well as the broader COPPHA Community, will be notified. We hope to provide a demonstration of its use during the week. 

    In the meantime, we suggest that you explore MetaROR which “provides a platform that leverages the publish–review-curate model to improve the dissemination and evaluation of metaresearch”. Note: MetaROR “use the term metaresearch, or research on research, to refer to all fields of research that study the research system itself.” MetaROR uses a similar system to that planned for PublishNow so it is highly relevant.

    On the MetaROR site you will find the interesting paper Preprint review services: Disrupting the scholarly communication landscape, which itself has been reviewed – and the reviews are open to view. Please explore this paper as well as the reviews, and we will discuss it in the forum.

    Part 2: Reflecting on the assignments posted during the COPPHA peer review course

    During the initial offering of the course Peer reviewing - from COPHHA, copied here where you can access and enrol on it, an assignment was required using  a common proforma for making the reviews. The table below shows the distribution of the answers given by those who submitted a review – the answers highlighted in yellow were those given in the model answer derived from a consensus of three of the course tutors.

    Question

    Answer

    N

    % of 210 participants*

    Does the abstract provide a concise summary of the study, including introduction, methods, results, and conclusions?

    Yes

    144

    69

    No

    9

    4

    Partially

    45

    21

    Do you have any concerns about the Introduction or Background to the study? These might include concerns about the literature review or the research question or hypothesis.

    Major concerns

    19

    9

    Minor concerns

    80

    38

    No concerns

    97

    46

    Do you have any concerns about the Methods section of the paper? These might include concerns about selection, measurement or confounding biases or the statistical analyses.

    Major concerns

    33

    16

    Minor concerns

    86

    41

    No concerns

    97

    37

    Do you have any concerns about the Results section of the paper? These might include concerns about selection, measurement or confounding biases or the statistical analyses - or if each table, figure or graph is fully understandable as a stand-alone.

    Major concerns

    22

    11

    Minor concerns

    81

    39

    No concerns

    94

    45

    Do you have any concerns about the Discussion or Conclusions section of the paper? These might include ethical concerns, usefulness or generalisability of the findings and if the study limitations have been adequately identified.

    Major concerns

    20

    10

    Minor concerns

    74

    35

    No concerns

    101

    48

    What is your recommendation?

    Approve without revision

    39

    19

    Approve, require minor revision

    125

    60

    Approve, require major revision

    28

    13

    Reject

    5

    2

    Transparency and Reproducibility: Is the research process transparent, and are data or code available for others to reproduce your findings?

    Yes

    130

    62

    No

    11

    6

    Partial

    52

    25

    Not relevant

    3

    4

    Language: Do you have any concerns about the writing style or use of language?

    Yes

    40

    19

    No

    154

    74

    *% of all 78 submissions (some answers were left blank so % for each question may not sum to 100)

    Please explore this table. The discussion forum will ask you to reflect on the differences between the model answers and those given by the participants.

    Finally.

    As you see, open publishing is a new and developing field. We hope that the two courses on peer review and open publishing have stimulated you to think about how we can improve both the quality of, and access to, scientific research globally. We hope that you will join COPPHA in its Community of Practice and contribute to further developments in the field.


    • Forum on open reviews and course experience منتدى
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      طرح منشورات في المنتدى: 1

      We ask you to consider two issues in this forum:

      1. Open review platform. What is your view of the use of open review platforms, you might refer to the paper Preprint review services: Disrupting the scholarly communication landscape which we presented above.

      2. Reflecting on assignment answers. What do you think are the reasons for the differences between the majority of the participant responses and those given by the tutors in the model answers? In particular that only 13% of the participants suggested Approve with major revisions - which was the preferred response in the model answer.