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.2016 Jan 29;11(1):e0147913.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147913. eCollection 2016.

Peer Review Quality and Transparency of the Peer-Review Process in Open Access and Subscription Journals

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Peer Review Quality and Transparency of the Peer-Review Process in Open Access and Subscription Journals

Jelte M Wicherts. PLoS One..

Abstract

Background: Recent controversies highlighting substandard peer review in Open Access (OA) and traditional (subscription) journals have increased the need for authors, funders, publishers, and institutions to assure quality of peer-review in academic journals. I propose that transparency of the peer-review process may be seen as an indicator of the quality of peer-review, and develop and validate a tool enabling different stakeholders to assess transparency of the peer-review process.

Methods and findings: Based on editorial guidelines and best practices, I developed a 14-item tool to rate transparency of the peer-review process on the basis of journals' websites. In Study 1, a random sample of 231 authors of papers in 92 subscription journals in different fields rated transparency of the journals that published their work. Authors' ratings of the transparency were positively associated with quality of the peer-review process but unrelated to journal's impact factors. In Study 2, 20 experts on OA publishing assessed the transparency of established (non-OA) journals, OA journals categorized as being published by potential predatory publishers, and journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Results show high reliability across items (α = .91) and sufficient reliability across raters. Ratings differentiated the three types of journals well. In Study 3, academic librarians rated a random sample of 140 DOAJ journals and another 54 journals that had received a hoax paper written by Bohannon to test peer-review quality. Journals with higher transparency ratings were less likely to accept the flawed paper and showed higher impact as measured by the h5 index from Google Scholar.

Conclusions: The tool to assess transparency of the peer-review process at academic journals shows promising reliability and validity. The transparency of the peer-review process can be seen as an indicator of peer-review quality allowing the tool to be used to predict academic quality in new journals.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests:Author Jelte Wicherts is a PLOS ONE Editorial Board member. This does not alter the author's adherence to PLOS ONE Editorial policies and criteria.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Distributions of transparency scores (sum of all items) in the DOAJ sample (top), and for journals that accepted (middle) or rejected (below) Bohannon’s hoax article.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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References

    1. Wicherts JM, Kievit RA, Bakker M, Borsboom D. Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. 2012;6:20 10.3389/fncom.2012.00020 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
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This work was funded by VIDI Grant no. 016.125.385 from the Netherlands Organisation for Research. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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