One of the things we want the Open Research Computation journal to do is bring more of the transparency and open critique that characterises the best Open Source Software development processes into the scholarly peer review process. But you can talk about changing the way peer review works and you can actively do something …

So my previous post on peer review hit a nerve. Actually all of my posts on peer review hit a nerve and create massive traffic spikes and I’m still really unsure why. The strength of feeling around peer review seems out of all proportion to both its importance and indeed the extent to which …

I’ve been meaning for a while to write something about peer review, pre and post publication, and the somewhat bizarre attachment of research community to the traditional approaches. A news article in Nature tho, in which I am quoted seems to have really struck a nerve for many people. The context in which the …

Nature Publishing Group yesterday announced a new venture, very closely modelled on the success of PLoS ONE, titled Scientific Reports. Others have started to cover the details and some implications so I won’t do that here. I think there are three big issues here. What does this tell us about the state of Open …

I spend a lot of my time arguing that many of the problems in the research community are caused by journals. We have too many, they are an ineffective means of communicating the important bits of research, and as a filter they are inefficient and misleading. Today I am very happy to be publicly …

Last Friday I spoke at the STM Innovation Seminar in London, taking in general terms the theme I’ve been developing recently of focussing on enabling user discovery rather than providing central filtering, enabling people to act as their own gatekeeper rather than publishers taking that role on themselves. The example I used, the JACS …

I recently made the most difficult decision I’ve had to take thus far as a journal editor. That decision was ultimately to accept the paper; that probably doesn’t sound like a difficult decision until I explain that I made this decision despite a referee saying I should reject the paper with no opportunity for …

A talk given in two slightly different forms at the NFAIS annual meeting 2010 (where I followed Clay Shirkey, hence the title) and at the Society for General Microbiology in Edinburgh in March. In the first case the talk was part of a panel of presentations intended to give the view of “scholars” to …

The online maths community has lit up with excitement as a document, claiming to prove one of the major outstanding theorems in maths has been circulated. In response an online peer review process has swung into action that is very similar to the kind of post-publication peer review that many of us have advocated. …

The idea that “it’s not information overload, it’s filter failure” combined with the traditional process of filtering scholarly communication by peer review prior to publication seems to be leading towards the idea that we need to build better filters by beefing up the curation of research output before it is published. Here I argue …