Open Peer Review

Information World Review recently reported that "the Royal Society is to charge authors £300 per page to use its new open access journal service" citing the cost of "peer review" as one of the main reasons for the charge. Hopefully theRoyal Society will take note of an article recently published in Nature: "Technical solutions: Wisdom of the Crowds" that argues for a re-definition of "peer".

Pointing to the rise of co-operative projects such as Wikipedia and "peer-to-peer networks" as the basis for a new model of peer-reviewing academic publication, Chris Anderson writes:

"Every day, thousands of researchers and students are discussing the latest papers, but their insights and opinions are not recorded and shared widely. This information needs only to be collected, organized and distributed to become far more useful. It's now possible to tap such collective intelligence online by doing to scientific publishing what the web has already done to mainstream media: democratizing it."

To read the full article in Nature:
www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature04992.html

The World Information Review article on the Royal Society can be found here:
www.iwr.co.uk/information-world-review/news/2159024/royal-society-charges-300-per

Nature is currently operating an open peer review trial for 3 months, full details and discussion on open peer review can be found here:
www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/index.html