Beyond Open Access: New Workflows for Open Peer Review

In the early days of open access, a main argument by opponents was that financial pressures of a pay-per-article system would encourage journals of take a lax view of peer review and publish inferior research to increase income. OA publishers experimented with open peer review to prove the rigor of the peer review process, but uptake was slow. Fast forward to 2022 where preprints are now an important component of a faster research cycle. They allow researchers to quickly and openly disseminate their research results, garner feedback from the community and get credit for discoveries earlier. Open Access publishers are, therefore, increasingly harnessing this energy to create new infrastructure and products to support open review of preprints and build that into new journals. This poster will present the innovative open peer review workflow offered by ScienceOpen as part of its hosting/publishing package and highlight several journals now running fully open peer review on the platform, including UCL Open: Environment, Systems Thinking, and Network Medicine. ScienceOpen has created an “off-the-rack” open peer review workflow for new journals and ones looking to go beyond open access to include a wider array of open science components. The workflow is based on open posting of pre-prints after editorial acceptance, editor managed peer review that is open to the whole community and beyond, multiple rounds of revision and editorial decision on final publication. ScienceOpen has been developing tools and workflows for open peer review together with the open access community for nearly 10 years and will share their expertise on this essential component of Open Science.