Young Academy of ScotlandEdinburgh, June 18, 2015 5-7 pm

ScienceOpen: Rethinking Peer Review

The scholarly publishing paradigm is changing – Open Access, altmetrics, data-mining are increasingly setting new standards. A recent Royal Society conference on “The Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication” called in particular for sweeping reforms to the current system of peer review. The new platform ScienceOpen has taken up the challenge. In order to put the evaluation of research back in the hands of researchers, we are experimenting with new forms of author-mediated pre-publication peer review. Published articles are open for transparent post-publication peer review and versioning to reflect feedback as the scientific community reads, works with, attempts to reproduce and builds on the results. The essential efforts of peer reviewers in this process are recognized with a citable CrossRef DOI for their report. ScienceOpen goes further to extend this open research evaluation process to over 1.5 million aggregated Open Access publications. We are taking advantage of this transitional moment to rethink how scientific communication, and particularly peer review could function in the future, because we believe that scholarly publishing is not an end in itself, but the beginning of a dialogue to move the whole scientific venture forward.

Stephanie Dawson, CEO ScienceOpen, grew up in northern California, studied Biology at Yale University and received a PhD in German Literature from the University of Washington. She spent over 10 years at the academic publisher De Gruyter in Berlin in the fields of biology and chemistry in both journals and book publishing. 2013 she joined ScienceOpen as managing director. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqOra-Dn8Sc