Post-publication peer review

Traditional pre-publication peer review. One of the main disadvantages lies in the time lost during the sometimes protracted peer review process. Also, the secrecy of the review process means that the valuable comments of the reviewers are invisible to the public.

Almost all scientific articles are currently reviewed before publication. This leads to sometimes dramatic delays in the public access to the information and in rare, extreme cases to purposeful delay of publication by self-interested reviewers. Alternatives exist like the popular physics and mathematics pre-print server arXiv but have no widely used equivalent in the life sciences. Nevertheless, new initiatives are under way in our fields which we will try to document here. Feel free to edit this page with your comments and findings.

Post-review journals/platforms

Faculty of 1000 is currently (2012) testing a post-publication review platform, or a call it a journal if you prefer. F10000 Research will be an online publication service that publishes articles almost immediately, after a brief quality check by their editorial team. The review process follows and is fully documented alongside the versions of the research article. For more see this article on post-publication peer review by Jane Hunter of F1000.

See also

• future of science publishing blog and its mention on OpenVisionScience
• thoughts regarding post-publication reader feedback [1] [2]
• short paragraph on post-publication peer review in the Wikipedia article on peer review
• summary of the UK 2011 inquiry into peer review
• brief discussion notes on alternative publishing models
• OpenWetWare:Information management/a model for novel publishing
• discussion on publication on OWW blogs 2008