Neil Christensen, Director of Digital Business Development, UC Press has responded to Stevan’s comments here:
http://goo.gl/iU2RWb From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: 14 August 2015 14:48 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <[email protected]> Subject: [GOAL] Re: Open peer review at Collabra: Q&A with UC Press Director Alison Mudditt So many natural questions come to mind; here are a few: 1. This is a new start-up journal, and a megajournal, and an OA journal: How representative of anything is the initial uptake rate for open peer review: for quality? for scaleability? for sustainability? 2. On what evidence is it stated that most peer review (with established journals) involves author anonymity and referee anonymity? (My own guess would be that most is just optional referee anonymity.) 3. The purpose of referee anonymity is frank reviewing witthout risk of retribution: How does open review ensure this (rather than the opposite)? (Should all election voting be open too?) 4. The purpose of author non-anonymity is to allow referees to take into account the author’s track record in evaluating new work: What evidence is there that quality control is as good as or better than the current level when track-record is withheld? 5. Collabra is a “megajournal,” covering many fields: Is the answer to these questions likely to be the same for all fields? 6. Individual journals, too, have track-records for quality-control standards. How does one determine the track record of a megajournal: the average across all fields? 7. Why open peer review rather than open peer commentary following peer review, revision and acceptance? (The referees can be invited to comment openly too: I always did this when I edited BBS. And I've never chosen the anonymity option when reviewing for any journal.) On the other hand, offering the referees of accepted papers the option of being named as the referees sounds like a good option, with no down side. On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 4:39 AM, Richard Poynder <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Earlier this year University of California Press (UC Press) launched a new open access mega journal called Collabra. One of the distinctive features of Collabra is that its authors can choose to have the peer review reports signed by the reviewers and published alongside their papers, making them freely available for all to read — a process usually referred to as open peer review. Since Collabra is offering open peer review on a voluntary basis it remains unclear how many papers will be published in this way, but the signs are encouraging: the authors of the first paper published by Collabra opted for open peer review, as have the majority of authors whose papers are currently being processed by the publisher. Moreover, no one has yet refused to be involved because open peer review is an option, and no one has expressed a concern about it. So how does open peer review work in practice and what issues does it raise? A short Q&A with UC Press Director Alison Mudditt is available here: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/open-peer-review-at-collabra-q-with-uc.html _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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