7: Barrier Reduction
Lower or remove the barrier for publication Other Information:
A more radical fix than the PLoS ONE model is to discard publishing as a meaningful incentive. How? Make it trivial to publish.
The peer review process presently serves as both gatekeeper and evaluator. Postpublication peer review can separate these
concepts by letting the author decide when to publish. Then, peer review operates solely as an evaluation mechanism (Armstrong,
1997; Nosek & Bar-Anan, 2012; Smith, 1999). Nosek and Bar-Anan (2012) provide in-depth discussion for how this is achievable
by embracing digital journals and public repositories and by restructuring the review process.
Stakeholder(s):
- arXiv: Successful models already exist, such as arXiv, the public repository for physics and other fields (http://arxiv.org; see
also http://ssrn.com/ and http://repec.org/). By submitting their manuscripts to arXiv, authors make their work publicly available
to the physics community. Peer review—through the "typical" journals—occurs independently of disseminating manuscripts through
the repository. If physicists want to wait for peer review to determine everything they read, they can still do so. But most
physicists use arXiv to keep up to date on what other laboratories are doing in their specialty.
- Research Authors: By making it trivial to publish, the act itself is no longer much of an incentive. Anyone can publish. The incentives would
then shift to evaluation of the research and its impact on future research (i.e., its contribution to cumulating knowledge).
Also, the priorities in the peer review process would shift from assessing whether the manuscript should be published to whether
the ideas should be taken seriously and how they can be improved (Nosek & Bar-Anan, 2012). Further, this would remove a major
barrier to publishing replications and negative results if and when they occur. The only barrier left would be the authors'
decision of whether it is worthwhile to write up a report at all.
- Research System: Finally, this change would alter the mindset that publication is the end of the research process. In the present system, it
is easy to perceive the final step in research occurring when the published article is added to one's vita. That is the incentive
of publication but not of knowledge building. Knowledge building incentives are satisfied when the research has impact on
new investigations. By reducing the value of publication, the comparative value of having impact on other research increases
(see Nosek & Bar-Anan, 2012, for a detailed discussion and addressing of common concerns about the impact of moving to a postpublication
peer review model).
Objective(s):
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