Open-Source Publishing

An interesting new approach to academic article publishing as described by Josh Cohen from Tufts University:

Open-peer review journals preserve scientific review by conducting reviews after the article’s initial release. Review takes place in the open, with comments and the peer reviewer’s name published online, along with the article authors’ responses and revised manuscript, and the reviewers’ final decision to “approve” the article, or not. Gates Open Research gathers three reviews for each article and reports how many of the reviewers ultimately approve of the science in the revised article. Pubmed indexes Gates Open Research articles after a majority of the three reviewers ultimately approve.

This approach makes a lot of sense.  By publishing before peer review, research findings get out faster.  On the other hand, by requiring 2 of 3 reviewers to approve the article before PubMed indexing, quality review is maintained.  Further, because peer review comments are public and unblended, one would expect peer reviewers to provide higher quality comments since their reputations are on the line.

F1000Research, uses a similar approach as Gates Open Research and it has published nearly 2,000 articles.

Dr. Cohen also describes the publication experience with Gates Open Research here.

Open-Source Publishing posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com