PeerJ's peer-review problem
Of all the scientific journals in the wild, there are a few I keep a closer eye on: they publish interesting results but more importantly they have been forward-thinking on matters of scientific publishing and they’ve also displayed a tendency to think out loud (through blog posts, say) and actively consider public feedback. Reading what they publish in these posts, and following the discussions that envelope them, has given me many useful insights into how scientific publishing works and, perhaps more importantly, how the perceptions surrounding this enterprise are shaped and play out.
One such journal is eLife. All their papers are open access, and they also publish the papers’ authors’ notes and reviewers’ comments with each paper. They also have a lively ‘magazine’ section in which they publish articles and essays by working scientists – especially younger ones – relating to the extended social environments in which knowledge-work happens. Now, for some reason, I’d cast PeerJ in similarly progressive light, even though I hadn’t visited their website in a long time. But on August 16, PeerJ published the following tweet:
