Open access publication, open review and open reviewer policy in the academia

First, I need to disclose that I am lucky to work with an institution that supports open access. In this post, I am sharing my observations about my (relatively new) experience with open access journal publications.

Open access

There has been a shift towards open access publication. Against the costly subscription fees mandated to the institutions, open access provides an alternative to reduce costs and increase visibility of publications. Many of the early open access journals are thriving (e.g. JMIR, PLOS, BMC, Frontiers), and currently other journals are also switching to full open-access policy and releasing new only open access journals (e.g. JAMIA Open, J of Pediatrics X, Lancet Digital Health). However, this alternative method directs the cost to individual authors. If your institution does not provide financial support for publication fees, it is a hard decision to go for open access.

A solution for publishing free open-access has been the open-access repositories, such as ArXiv, SSRN or ResearchGate. These platforms help you release preprint version (non-reviewed) or author copy of your paper with an assigned DOI. Having a DOI means that your paper could be accessible online and visible through some academic search engines like Google Scholar. However, non-reviewed paper may not get the attention as much as a journal paper. On the other side, most of the journals support sharing author copy of your publication -not the published version! (check journal publication policy page). It means even if you submit a journal that publishes behind paywall, you may sill share an unformatted author copy of your paper in your personal page citing the publishing journal.

Open reviewer

I have been contributing as a reviewer to a number of journals for a long time. Once I started to review for open access journals that acknowledge the reviewers (which means they publish your name with the paper you reviewed, such as, JMIR), I notice the value added for a reviewer as well as the paper.

First, appreciation and acknowledgement of your work as a reviewer publicly is encouraging and motivating. Reviewers are no more in the shadows for their voluntary contributions. Thanks to Publons, you can now showcase and quantify your review contributions in your profile.

Second, open-reviewer policy adds extra responsibility and accountability to the reviewers, not only leaving to the authors and editors. That would potentially increase the quality of review.

Finally, knowing the reviewers of a paper potentially increase the value and credibility. Most of the times, your paper is reviewed by an academic or expert in your field. Disclosing these reviewers would grant a level of validation and credibility to your paper, especially if your paper is reviewed by a well-known scientist in your field. On the other side, this also gives a certain level of confidence to the authors knowing it your work is appreciated and approved by fellows that are knowledgeable in your domain.

Open review

Open (non-blind) review means a reviewer can see the author names and details. As a reviewer, I would like to see the author names and do a little research on authors before reviewing to understand their expertise and merit in the domain. This creates a bias for sure but not necessarily negative.

Getting to know authors helps to understand the experience of authors in the field. This helps reviewer to adjust comments accordingly. For instance, if authors are junior or new in the field, providing more constructive feedback with guidance and references would be much helpful. But if we look at the negative effect: a reviewer could unintentionally loose neutral perspective to the paper by the cognitive bias created. It means that if reviewer knows that the authors are so good at the field, it may lead to overlook the details, skipping errors with the assumption that authors know better (similar to Halo effect). On the other side, if the authors did not have good track records or published in predatory/shady journals before (even unknowingly), that may negatively affect the reviewer’s approach (similar to Horn effect).

In some cases, noticing that the authors are from industry and publishing about their solution or technology may put a reviewer on alert mode. Not always but sometimes, authors may over-polish their work without enough evidence provided. This is not necessarily only for industry, and could be observed on any publications. Especially with junior authors, this tendency may also exist (tendency to thrive 😊).

Suggestion: Open review comments

Open access publication and open review have positives and negatives. Moving the needle a bit forward in transparency of open reviewing process, I would like to suggest a new layer of information to be shared publicly: it is “open review comments”.

During the revision process, authors may provide valuable information while responding to the comments for explaining their work, justifying their approach or for rebuttal. However, these information may not be incorporated to manuscript all the time, but potentially inform readers about the rationale. My suggestion is to share supplementary documents to published papers which enclose the reviewer comments and responses from authors. Each comment may not worth mentioning, thus, journal may request authors to pick top 3 or 5 comments to share in a structured manner. I assumed this has been practiced in engineering domain, but also could provide value to each publication in health informatics domain, in a way to provide a resourceful FAQ page. That could also help prospective authors to review potential comments from reviewers.

Thank you for reading.