Chemistry Central Blog

Worries about the peer-reviewed publishing process

On the ChemSpider blog Antony Williams has been sharing his worries about the peer-reviewed publishing process. His blog posting raises many important questions, and asks whether open access journals are becoming the fallback.

Below is a copy of my reply:

You might want to read an editorial which recently appeared in The Scientist (http://www.the-scientist.com/2007/5/1/13/1/) regarding access to closed files, such as correspondence with authors, confidential reviewer comments and ratings, and internal editorial exchanges. Such a move would make public your objections (as a reviewer) to certain manuscripts that actually get published, and I would guess make Editors less likely to allow such articles through without significant revision.

While there are many differences between open access journals and traditional subscription journals, such as free and unhindered access to the research and associated data, the right to reuse and redistribute it, no page length restrictions and for authors to retain ownership of their work, they have many of the same motivations. All journals aim to build a reputation that will make authors want to publish in it. This is achieved by recruiting respected Editorial Boards and imposing high editorial standards, including stringent peer-review.

Our open access journals allow anyone to download and use the associated data files, making evaluating the research easier. We allow comments to be posted on and about any article and are working on adding blog-trackbacks to our articles so that those intending to read the article can already see what the community is saying. These are all valuable forms of post-review.

Posted by Bryan Vickery at 16:13    Comments (0)