Differences to traditional peer review
The service had several practices that differed from the traditional approaches to academic peer review and submissions.Concurrent and shared journal consideration
PoS implemented a "unified reviewing process", which reduced "the workload of the reviewers’ community, as manuscripts do not need to be reviewed repeatedly while descending the journal prestige ladder." Journals participating in the system's ''Select'' option had concurrent access to all peer review processes. Editors were free to make publishing offers to authors at any time, and authors were free to choose whether to accept or decline the offers. Journals participating in the system's ''Connect'' option had access to a process if authors chose to submit to that journal. In both cases, the same peer reviews were used by several journals, instead of being discarded in the event of rejection from one journal.Improving the quality of reviews
PoS aimed to enhance the quality of reviewing by encouraging non-anonymous review, introducing ‘peer review of peer review’, providing the possibility for reviewers to publish their review as a ‘Peerage Essay’ (PE) and to build a ‘referee factor’.Attracting reviewers
The motivation to participate as a peer reviewer in this system came from a reputation system where the quality of the reviewing was scored by other users, and contributed to one's profile. Evaluation of other peer reviewers was an additional task for participating academics, but most appeared to be eager to do this: while other stages were completed typically just before a deadline, the judging task was on average completed in just a few days. Also, PoS had rules, that "peers can only submit manuscripts when they keep in balance the number of reviews performed and the number of manuscripts submitted".Open Engagement
Instead of reviewers being appointed by an editor, reviewers in this system chose what they wanted to review. Thus, the process could terminate at first deadline if there were no willing peer reviewers, or it could attract many more reviewers than the standard two. Any user, including the authors themselves, could recommend a reviewer for a manuscript. However, peers from the same institutions as authors, and peers who have co-authored with authors in the last three years, were automatically excluded and could not peer review the manuscript.Author control over deadlines
Upon uploading their manuscript to the system, authors could specify four deadlines: # Deadline for sending peer reviews # Deadline for peer-review-of-peer-review, the reciprocal judging of the accuracy of peer reviews # Deadline for sending the revised manuscript # Deadline for final evaluation of the revised manuscript During the process, the deadlines are automatically enforced.Business model
The company's services were free for scientists, and it did not pay peer reviewers. Publishers owning participating journals paid for usage of the service. Peerage of Science had such contracts with e.g. Springer, Taylor & Francis, BioMed Central, Elsevier and Brill.See also
Axios Review dimensons.aiReferences
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