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Review of 'TrueReview: A Platform for Post-Publication Peer Review'
Average rating: | Rated 4.5 of 5. |
Level of importance: | Rated 5 of 5. |
Level of validity: | Rated 4 of 5. |
Level of completeness: | Rated 4 of 5. |
Level of comprehensibility: | Rated 4 of 5. |
Competing interests: | I work for ScienceOpen |
Reviewed article
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- Abstract: found
- Article: found
TrueReview: A Platform for Post-Publication Peer Review
Review information
Review text
This is a thoughtful piece by the authors on providing yet another venue for post-publication peer review (PPPR). However, I feel that more needs to be done to address more of the concerns or barriers that exist to large-scale PPPR. Providing another platform might address technological barriers, but the main barriers to PPPR uptake are inherently social.
Some of these are addressed in brief here: http://blog.scienceopen.com/2017/03/what-are-the-barriers-to-post-publication-peer-review/
- Post-publication peer review takes too much time and effort on top of all other academic responsibilities
- There is little motivation or duty to performing PPPR, despite existing incentives
- There are alredy too many competing venues or platforms for PPPR, with little interoperability
- Junior researchers (and other marginalised demographics) do not wish to appear 'confrontational' in public due to fear of public (or private) backlash from senior researchers
- Usage and readership of PPPR is low
Another useful post to consider in this context is here: https://blogs.openaire.eu/?p=1205
"“Post-publication peer review” (PPPR) has gained a lot of traction in recent years. As with much of peer review’s confusing lexicon, however, this term is ambiguous. This ambiguity stems from confusion over what constitutes “publication” in the digital age. PPPR conflates two distinct phenomena, which we would do better to treat separately, namely “open pre-review manuscripts” and “open final-version commenting”.
I should also note that ScienceOpen allows PPPR for more than 31 million articles on the platform (at the time of writing), and not just those it has published. Numerical reputation is provided in reveiwer profils, as well as via platforms like ORCID or Publons.
Either way, this looks like an exciting development, but I look forward to seeing more about how social/cultural barriers to PPPR can be addressed by the proposed platform. I fear that without consideration of these, any new platform will simply enter into system that academics are not ready for yet.