Reading Peer Review: PLOS ONE and Institutional Change in Academia (Elements in Publishing and Book Culture)

This Element describes for the first time the database of peer review reports at PLOS ONE, the largest scientific journal in the world, to which the authors had unique access. Specifically, this Element presents the background contexts and histories of peer review, the data-handling sensitivities of this type of research, the typical properties of reports in the journal to which the authors had access, a taxonomy of the reports, and their sentiment arcs. This unique work thereby yields a compelling and unprecedented set of insights into the evolving state of peer review in the twenty-first century, at a crucial political moment for the transformation of science. It also, though, presents a study in radicalism and the ways in which PLOS's vision for science can be said to have effected change in the ultra-conservative contemporary university. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Cover 1 Title page 3 Copyright page 4 Reading Peer Review 6 Contents 7 1 Peer Review and Its Discontents 9 What Is Peer Review and Is It Any Good? 9 The Study of Peer Review 12 New Modalities of Peer Review 18 Post-Publication Review 18 Open Peer Review 22 New Media Formats 25 Conclusions 25 2 The Radicalism of PLOS 27 A New Hope 27 The Peer Review Database and Its Sensitivities 31 How Much Do Reviewers Write? 32 What Do Reviewers Write? 36 3 New Technologies, Old Traditions? 48 Did PLOS’s Guidelines Yield a New Review Format? 48 Do Reviewers in PLOS ONE Ignore Novelty? 52 Are Reviews in PLOS ONE More Critically Constructive? 56 How Much of a Role Does the Authors’ Language Play in Reviewers’ Verdicts? 62 How Much of Reviewer Behaviour Can Be Controlled/Anticipated? 65 To What Extent Do Reviewers Understand New Paradigms of Review? 67 4 PLOS, Institutional Change, and the Future of Peer Review 76 How Successful Was PLOS in Changing Peer Review? 76 References 84 Acknowledgements 118 Funding 118 About the Authors 118