An update on peer review and research data

Abstract

Technological advances in the amounts of data that researchers generate and use are causing problems for the scholarly communication system. How, when and by whom should quality checks and assurance be integrated into this – already overloaded – ecosystem? This paper outlines the challenges, illustrates some current initiatives and posits possible directions for the future.

Data journals: types of peer review, review criteria, and editorial committee members’ positions

“…Some, albeit relatively few, data journals incorporated data editors or experts into the editorial committees to evaluate technical data quality and to support appropriate data curation. This relates to the suggestion made by Callaghan et al, who argued in favor of a plan for reducing the data peer review burden that involved letting a data curation expert review the data's technical quality and a subject expert review the scientific quality through "split[ting] peer review up into separate phases carried out by different people" [5]. Conclusion: Interactive or community peer review is a new peer review model applied to data journals, which enables members of various scholarly communities to join peer reviews and helps increase peer review transparency and reliability by choosing an open review.…”

“…The publication process of data journals is similar to that of traditional scholarly journals, and their main process is to distribute data sets via peer review and data repositories [3]. Unlike the peer review of research articles, however, data peer review lacks agreement on consistent criteria or standards, and the understanding and approaches of data peer review vary across disciplines [4][5][6]. Hence, clear definitions do not exist as to how the processes of traditional peer review can be applied to data, or what should be guaranteed through peer review [1].…”

Developing a scientific journal in a changing world

“…The purpose of this article is to review the situation of BASE after two decades of publication, a period during which scientific communication has evolved significantly. The questioning by part of the scientific community of the impact factor as the only means of evaluating the quality of publications (Satyanarayana, 2010;Casadevall & Fang, 2014;Callaway, 2016) has led to the creation of alternative metrics (Galligan & Dyas-Correia, 2013); in addition, the emphasis on the weaknesses of the conventional peer review process (Margalida & Colomer, 2016;Murphy, 2016) and the numerous experiments that have been made with open review systems (Bon, 2015) have appealed to scientists. Above all, however, there have been major advances in open access, the system adopted by journals such as BASE, which consists of offering a free service to authors and completely free access to published articles.…”

Faire évoluer une revue scientifique dans un monde changeant

“…D'une part, la mise en cause, par une partie de la communauté scientifique, du facteur d'impact comme seul moyen d'évaluation de la qualité des publications (Satyanarayana, 2010 ;Casadevall & Fang, 2014 ;Callaway, 2016) a mené à la création de métriques alternatives (Galligan & Dyas-Correia, 2013). D'autre part, la mise en avant des faiblesses du peer review « classique » (Margalida & Colomer, 2016 ;Murphy, 2016) et les nombreuses expériences tentées vers des systèmes de validation ouverts (Bon, 2015) ont interpellé les scientifiques. Mais surtout, les avancées majeures de l'Open Access, avec l'avènement des revues qui, comme BASE, offrent un service gratuit aux auteurs et un accès totalement libre aux articles publiés, ont révolutionné un système jusque-là dominé par des éditeurs payants ayant acquis une situation de quasi-monopole.…”