Diversification and Decentralization of Peer Review

Session Description

A research article can be seen as a conversation between scholars, and in the past this conversation took place almost exclusively between privileged colleagues, and then more recently as part of the anonymous peer review process. Today technology allows this conversation to take place in the open, in forums like preprint servers, and the conversation can be ongoing with post publication commenting. There are now multiple providers of what is sometimes called “community peer review” offering various services targeted at different parts of the scholarly communications ecosystem, from preprint servers to journal peer review to post-publication commenting. What’s more, these providers are not only pushing boundaries on how peer review is conducted, many of them are also expanding what peer reviewers look like, bringing in more diversity and working to train early career researchers. There are many organizations that are experimenting with new and innovative forms of peer review. In this session we will examine the various types of experiments, how these services can help diversify science, and how their efforts are contributing to trust and integrity.