Open for review: report on OpenAIRE's experiments with Open Peer Review

As part of its mission to further Open Science and investigate how openness and transparency can improve scientific processes, OpenAIRE has been conducting a range of activities investigating the new models of peer review to literature and beyond that fall under the term "Open Peer Review" (OPR). OPR is an umbrella term for a variety of ways in which the traditional peer review process can be by modifed to make it more inclusive, transparent and/or accountable. Its main aspects are: open identities (authors and reviewers are aware of each other's identity), open reports (review reports are published alongside the relevant article) and open participation (the wider community can contribute to the review process).

Amongst other activities  - including our OPR workshop, stakeholder survey and (ongoing) attempt to formalise the definition of OPR - in late 2015/early 2016, OpenAIRE played host to three innovative experiments that aimed at promoting experimentation in OPR, studying its effects in the context of digital infrastructures for open scholarship, and investigating ways in which OPR technologies might integrate with OpenAIRE’s infrastructure. The three experiments were diverse in their aims and methods:

• Open Scholar and their consortium aimed to turn repositories into functional evaluation platforms by building an open peer review module for integration with Open Access repositories and then implementing this module in two high-profile institutional repositories.
• The Winnower sought to integrate the Winnower platform with repositories like Zenodo via DOIs and APIs to facilitate open peer review of repository objects, as well as offering financial incentives to encourageopen participation in the sharing of ‘journal club’ reviews and documenting user experiences via survey.
• OpenEdition aimed to use open services such as the annotation software hypotheses.org and OpenEdition’s platform for academic blogs to model a workflow (selection, review and revision) that would develop blog articles into peer reviewed publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The full report of the outcomes of these experiments is now available via Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.154647
We would very much welcome and feedback on this report from any and all interested parties. This could take the form of a formal review of the report as publication, a comment on your judgement of the value of the work contained therein, or just a quick note to advise of any formatting/language issues that should be addressed in any future version.

Please make use of the commentary function (below) of this blogpost to leave your feedback on the report. All comments will be gratefully received!

NOTE: We would also really like to know what you think about open peer review! Take part in our OPR survey here until 7th October!