The PeerChoice Process

Peer review remains the best system to assess the quality of submitted scientific articles. The Peer review survey 2009 shows that researchers want to improve peer review, not replace it, by a more targeted selection process and by enhancing speed. With this in mind, the journal Chemical Physics Letters will experiment with a new feature added to the peer review process, ensuring that current checks and balances remain in place. This experiment has commenced in June 2010 and will initially run for three months.

The current peer review process revolves around attributes such as anonymity (single blind or double blind, or, open), reviewer selection (self-selected or selected), timing (prepublication/post-publication), open or non-open.

Previous experiments revolved around making the process less anonymous (open peer review process experiments, making use of blog-type functionality), and tinkering with timing (especially post-publication open “blog” type options).

Both streams of peer review experimentation seem to conclude towards consolidation, at least for now or in part, to the incumbent models: pre-publication peer review, and, to a lesser degree, single blind peer review.

Critics have argued that post-publication commenting of STM papers by content platform visitors, is potentially damaging for some of the fundamentals of peer review: the constructive, thorough and relevant commenting by a distant or anonymous colleague.

The pilot at hand addresses an important discussion point in the current prevailing peer review model: article relevancy. Reviewers often refuse an article sent to them based on the feeling that it is not relevant to their research.

PeerChoice completely reverses the current model in which the Editor finds a reviewer matching a submitted article, into: the reviewer selects the article that seems a best match to his/her academic competency and current interest. This pilot will replace the “push” with a “pull” approach to reviewing in order to maximize time, relevancy, existing scientific networks and new technologies.

Here is how it will work:

We will be actively creating awareness of newly submitted articles to those scientists who are known to have an active interest in the subject at hand.

On the basis of abstract and title, registered scientists will be allowed to download the submitted articles – under one condition: they agree to submit a timely review. In order to facilitate this, a simplified review form making use of radio buttons has been designed.

Articles will be available for such a self-selected review process for a limited time only and/or until a given number of volunteers have agreed to review and download the article.

Meanwhile, the Editors will be planning to initiate the normal review process. However, any of the reviews thus obtained very early in the process, can and will be used as supporting and supplementary information for decision making.

Expectation is, for a certain percentage of articles a decision to reject or accept will be taken more quickly – of course, without any compromise with regards the existing standards of careful decision making. For articles that have not been downloaded for such self-selected review, the normal review process will prevail anyway.

In order to test the concept and its associated processes and software, we would like to start with a limited pilot group on the articles submitted to the journal on nanostructures and materials.

As usual, the Editors are in control of the review process and final decision making, but the reviews submitted through PeerChoice will be used as official reviews (i.e. serving as supporting and supplementary information for decision making by the Editor).

Elsevier fully supports peer review and sees it as the best mechanism to certify scholarly research, but is open to any mechanism which may enhance or increase efficiency within this proven approach.

We, like most scientific publishing companies, rely on effective peer review processes to uphold not only the quality and validity of individual articles, but also the overall integrity of the journals we publish.