Reading Peer Review: PLOS ONE and Institutional Change in Academia

Description

This Element describes for the first time the database of peer review reports at PLOS ONE, the largest scientific journal in the world, to which the authors had unique access. Specifically, this Element presents the background contexts and histories of peer review, the data-handling sensitivities of this type of research, the typical properties of reports in the journal to which the authors had access, a taxonomy of the reports, and their sentiment arcs. This unique work thereby yields a compelling and unprecedented set of insights into the evolving state of peer review in the twenty-first century, at a crucial political moment for the transformation of science. It also, though, presents a study in radicalism and the ways in which PLOS's vision for science can be said to have effected change in the ultra-conservative contemporary university. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Cover Title page Copyright page Reading Peer Review Contents 1 Peer Review and Its Discontents What Is Peer Review and Is It Any Good? The Study of Peer Review New Modalities of Peer Review Post-Publication Review Open Peer Review New Media Formats Conclusions 2 The Radicalism of PLOS A New Hope The Peer Review Database and Its Sensitivities How Much Do Reviewers Write? What Do Reviewers Write? 3 New Technologies, Old Traditions? Did PLOS’s Guidelines Yield a New Review Format? Do Reviewers in PLOS ONE Ignore Novelty? Are Reviews in PLOS ONE More Critically Constructive? How Much of a Role Does the Authors’ Language Play in Reviewers’ Verdicts? How Much of Reviewer Behaviour Can Be Controlled/Anticipated? To What Extent Do Reviewers Understand New Paradigms of Review? 4 PLOS, Institutional Change, and the Future of Peer Review How Successful Was PLOS in Changing Peer Review? References Acknowledgements Funding About the Authors