The peer review process in science publication has been imperative in making sure that articles and journals written are based off data that was obtained ethically. With the push to make publications more transparent and cheaper, the importance and existence of peer reviewing have been called into question.

How Peer Review Works Right Now

It all starts with research. Scientists collect data, analyze and interpret it, and write up their results. If these findings are noteworthy and have a positive impact on science, they will submit their work to a journal. The publishers will send the initial submission to other researchers in the field so the methods and reasoning conveyed in the paper is analyzed by people who are experts in the field. Both the reviewers and the editors of the journal provide feedback to the authors asking for more citations,  improved clarity, or something more serious like asking for better justification of their conclusions or a figure that would justify their judgements. This back and forth of submission, editing (with potential for rejection), and revision can be lengthy and frustrating, but it allows for the journals that make it through this process to maintain a very high standard.

How We Got Here

For some perspective on why journals and the publication scheme is the way it is, we have to consider publishing before the digital age. Having your paper included in a journal was a central part of how the individual research would ever be seen and considered valid. During a time where it was costly to print and mass distribute intricately colored figures, scientist would submit their work to publishers for them to circulate the information. It has also always been important that an impartial editor parse through the work to determine potential bias or fraudulent data. Traditionally there has also been ranking in journal publishers with respect to prestige, allowing the trustworthiness of a publisher boost the impact of the article.

But with the use of the internet and the Information Age, many of these (traditional publication values) have become obsolete. It has become very easy to produce complicated figures, and even easier to post and share data, not just within the scientific community but potentially with everyone. With that said, instead of publishing costs going down, they have been steadily increasing. The science publishing industry generated $10 billion in revenue in 2015 with profit margins on average being 20-30% but some specific publishers like Wiley and Elsevier have up to 40-50% profit from scientific, technical, and medical publishing.

Clarifications and Ethical Questions

Now to be clear, profit as such is not the issue. Making capital is the way that companies can improve thus producing better and better products over time. Within academic publishing, it’s a question of it it makes sense for individuals, education systems, or research institutions to pay $35 per article or over $1000 per year to access data.

When the data itself was initially funded by a government sponsored grant should the taxpayer be denied access? If some academic journals continue to raise prices of subscriptions, other than prestige, is there more value being produced? When it’s academic and research institutions and libraries, sources and collections of knowledge, paying the bulk of these prices, is it right that the easy spread of information is being hampered by publishers?

Perks of Open Access

Open access (OA) journals make articles free for anyone to read online, usually by charging authors or funders. As such, there are no pay walls to hurdle over if you want to read a primary source. This not only cuts back on price per person, but it makes sharing and spreading ideas much easier and allows for data, information, and knowledge to readily pass from the research lab to literally anyone with the internet. Not only is this a powerful tool for educators, libraries, and individuals, but it permits Science itself to be built upon and increase when there are no restrictions to access. When more people can see the scientific work and parse through the data, more future progress can be made off of it.

Some of the bigger, well known examples of open access science journals are the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and Science Advances (through Science magazine) but there are many mare that are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).

The cost of open access comes in the form of an article processing charge (APC) to pay for the cost of web hosting, editing, and quality assurance. The cost of publishing in an open access journal on average is about half that of a publication that requires subscriptions and prints copies of the articles for distribution. And where it can cost an author up to $5K to publish in a prestigious journal, the charge to publish in an open access journal can be as high as $3.9K but as low as $8. These higher prices allow for the work to appear in a publication that would otherwise be paywalled, aka you are paying for the title of the journal.

Review Process in OA Journals

There are sometimes incentives to be a reviewer. Depending on the journal, the position is a paid one usually if it is done in a timely manner. But a lot of the times, in both subscription and open access based journals, the evaluation process is mainly a volunteer one. Originally, this comes from subscription-based publications giving article access to individuals/researchers who help them peer review so there is value being exchanged between them. In the OA sphere, this type of evaluation is still certainly important even though the hook of gaining access is not present. Peer review has always provided a system where volunteer reviewers collectively spend thousands of hours to work together with authors ideally to the end of furthering human knowledge.

With it being relatively simple to start up an open access journal, there has been some skepticism in the legitimacy of the articles published. Errors, fraudulent data, or irreproducible studies written in scientific papers, not only diminish public trust in science, but can destroy future research projects. The lack of peer review in some OA journals has been a product of the pressures to publish and the lack of standards at the beginning of the open access movement.

Verifying Legitimacy

To test the extent of the shortcomings of peer review, John Bohannon of Science created a fake paper full of bad methodology and unfounded conclusions and submitted it to open-access journals to test the amount of scrutiny and fact analysis that occurred within these institutions back in 2013. This study primarily used two databases of journals, one that is rigorous and the other, unreliable. The former is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Created by library scientist Lars Bjornshauge from Sweden, DOAJ claims to provide high quality peer reviewed research journals. A journal becomes associated with this organization by having enough publications that have been reviewed and approved by editors. The other is a list created by Jeffrey Beall, a library scientist out of the University of Colorado. It contains questionable open access publishers that have little to no revision process before posting scholarly content.

Of total number of 255 papers that Bohannan submitted and received a response, 157 were accepted and only 98 rejected it – about 62%. More surprisingly, 45% of the DOAJ’s journals accepted the paper. In March 2014, they have since made their requirements more strict, but it is clear that the critique process within open-access journals are an issue. With the sheer amount of content being produced and made available on the internet, not just by scientists but by all academic fields, the work of the editor and reviewer is daunting but this is no excuse to let standards or quality slip.

Potential Solution

There is much debate about what should be done to guarantee that the content within open access articles is legitimate. Many still hold onto the traditional framework of an initial editor checks the citations and the overall logic, then relays it to a few experts who conduct the peer review. But, again, with the sheer amount of submissions this becomes a difficult and time consuming task. Recently, there has been as shift to a two-tiered system involving post-publication review. This system involves reviewers and academic peers to critique an article after it has been posted. Post-publication peer review is “an efficient complement to traditional peer-review that allows for the continuous improvement and strengthening of the quality of science publishing.” Not only does this permit a more dynamic model, because new research can influence older paper’s truth value, but it enables more scientists and experts to have a say,cutting back on the inconsistencies found in traditional review systems.

Closing Remarks

In principle, the effects of peer reviewing are very positive: a board of experts set standards for scholarly rigor and determine if new articles meet these standards. New results need to maintain credibility and reliability so scientists and the public can read it and trust the content so to build off of it and make better informed decisions. As such, the infrastructure of peer review should remain but opening up scientific critique to post-publication also allows for future studies to affect older research and a continuous review constantly verifying the conclusions and impact of each article. Moreover, having this information accessible, rather than behind an expensive paywall, promotes scientific education, literacy, and opens opportunities to pool knowledge into something much more meaningful and impacting.

Stay tuned for more on open access science since I will be making this into a series!

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below or send an email. Also happy to take any topic suggestions!