Month: September 2015

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Peer Review at RIO: Part 2

Having explained our pre-submission peer-review last week, in this post we’re going to explain our post-publication peer-review.

Why use open post-publication peer-review?

  • Removes unnecessary delay
  • Provides much needed transparency

Most journals use post-submission peer-review and only make the work public online once this process is completed. This results in long delays before the work is made public, often many months or even years in the worst cases. These publication delays (see figure below) are largely unnecessary: making a work public and operating a peer-review process on that work are two separate processes that do not need to interfere with each other.

publication delays chart

 

Daniel Himmelstein (2015). Publication delays at PLOS and 3,475 other journals. Zenodo. 10.5281/zenodo.19117 Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

By publishing almost immediately after pre-submission review, RIO Journal will help researchers establish the priority of their research outputs. We aren’t the first to use this system: F1000Research have been successfully using post-publication peer review since 2012 and everyone including PubMed accepts the validity of articles published this way.

Why is open reviewing a good idea?

Very few think that single-blind reviewing is optimal. Some think that double-blind reviewing results in fairer outcomes but we believe that this only treats the symptoms and does not address the causes of improper or poor reviewing. At RIO Journal, all post-publication reviews will be open, in addition to pre-submission reviews which go public as well – there will be no option to provide non-public review, pre-submission or post-publication. Furthermore, all reviews will be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), so that the reviews are open access and attributed to their authors, just like the published works.

Again, it’s important to note that open and published reviews are not a radical ‘new’ thing in some subject areas. For instance, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has identified reviewers since 1999, and Biology Direct has been successfully using open and published peer-review since 2006. For subject areas where open, published peer-review is a novel concept we suggest – try it for yourself with us!

Open and published reviews have benefits for both authors and reviewers – this is particularly important to consider given that reviewers do their work as an unpaid service to scholarship. To be able to have a citable, open record of contributed reviews, it is desirable to provide small and impartial reward for reviewers.

How does it work?

The main difference in our model of open post-publication review from those used by other journals, for example F1000Research, is that:

  • Post-publication review at RIO is just the 3rd step of checks on a manuscript. The first step is the pre-submission peer-review (see our previous blog) while authoring, the second is the technical and editorial evaluation in-house. The result of all this is that authors have the chance to revise and improve their manuscripts several times.
  • After a manuscript is published, the authors have the option to request  journal-arranged post-publication peer-review and editorial validation or to keep the publication in its first version, submitted and published after pre-submission review and technical/editorial checks.
  • Authors can also decide at any point to request publication of revised versions. So, they have the chance to improve their works if post-publication reviews are negative.  Only RIO Journal editors can provide the stamp of Validation on an output once sufficient, acceptable post-publication reviews have been received.

post-publication peer review chart

Next week we will blog about our plans for societal impact labelling on outputs to facilitate cross-disciplinary reading and collaboration. If you have any questions in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to contact us via the comments section, Twitter @RIOJournal, or via email.

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Peer Review at RIO: Part 1

In this post we shall explain our much anticipated use of pre-submission peer-review.
This is not the only model of peer-review we will operate. Next week we will explain our post-publication peer-review.

You may be asking yourself – how can peer-review happen before submission?

This is a good question. Almost all traditional journals only arrange for peer-review to happen after submission. Manuscript review, immediately prior to submission can take place at RIO because of our unique authoring platform: ARPHA.

We think this will fit-in well with the normal research practices of many, as researchers often send off manuscripts to colleagues immediately prior to submission for checking with ‘a fresh pair of eyes’ anyway. All RIO seeks to do is to make this natural process more formal and transparent. Indeed, why spend so much precious time on pre-publication review and revisions, when this work could be done in an user-friendly online collaboration environment still during the authoring process?

The concept is this:

  • The author(s) write or load their documents in our what-you-see-is-what-you-get writing tool: ARPHA
  • When they think it is ready, they ask one or more colleagues to read the work and give a basic assessment of whether it is fit-to-publish in it’s current form. ARPHA provides Google Docs-like functionality for making inline comments and highlighting as well as ‘general’ comments.
  • This colleague (the pre-submission reviewer), logs into ARPHA from their own account, reads the work on ARPHA, and fills out a simple form declaring the work worthy of being made public to the world in RIO.
  • Final review statement and the name of the colleague is made public alongside the work after publication.

RIO will not publish outputs that it thinks are pseudoscience, that have unresolved ethical issues, or are otherwise not appropriate for an academic journal. This applies even if a pre-submission reviewer thinks that the output is ‘OK’ for publication. Checks by RIO technical and subject editors are performed both before and after submission to the journal, if serious problems are found, publication may be prevented.

For clarity, we have produced a diagram of the proposed pre-submission workflow below.

pre submission workflow diagram

Outputs that must undergo pre-submission peer-review include:

Research Articles, Review Articles, Replication Studies, Methods, Case Studies, Opinion Articles, Data Papers, Questionnaires, and Software Descriptions.

Outputs for which pre-submission peer-review is optional include*:

Research Ideas, Research Proposals, PhD Project Plans, PhD Theses, Small Grant Proposals, Grant Proposals, Data Management Plans, Software Management Plans, Single-figure publications, Research Posters, Research Presentations, Conference Abstracts, Correspondence, Project Reports, Policy/Communication Briefs, and Wikipedia Articles.

Next week, we will blog about our processes for post-publication peer-review. If you have any questions in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to contact us via the comments section, Twitter @RIOJournal, or via email.

*Even though pre-submission review is optional for a few manuscript types, the authors will be strongly encouraged to seek peer-review.

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Counting days and tweets: What’s happened to RIO Journal so far?

So, here we are, counting days and Twitter impressions since Research Ideas & Outcomes (or, RIO for short) our new open access journal was officially announced on 1st September 2015. As much as we were excited to take this long-prepared and anticipated stand in the spotlight, we are still holding our breath ahead of the big event – the launch itself, scheduled for November 2015.

In the meantime, when not busy welcoming our very first subject editors, we have our ear to the ground, so that we can make sure to provide everyone with the best services and insight. The truth is, we don’t only value attention, we deeply appreciate your opinion and respect your needs and concerns.

So, here below we provide a short summary of the eventful first week of RIO Journal:

It all started on 1st September on Twitter. Among the constantly growing list of our first followers, there were a lot of welcoming retweets, sounding just as excited as we were:

Then, the time came for the world media to give its verdict:

This week sees the birth of a new type of scientific journal, one that will publish not only study results and data, but also research ideas and proposals. It’s called Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).
/The Scientist, 3rd September/

With so many science journals already in existence, it is rare for a new title to draw attention. But researchers and publishing experts are taking notice of Research Ideas and Outcomes, or RIO, an open-access journal that launched on 1 September.
/Nature, 3rd September/

Understandably, the hottest discussion points were RIO’s initiatives:

> To present openly the whole process of the research cycle especially including research proposals
> To publish such ideas regardless of them being eventually approved or rejected for funding
> To apply a transparent, public, and open peer-review policy

Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London shared on Twitter that in his opinion RIO is “bringing a new sense of transparency and collaboration to research”, while he voiced his strong support for preprint publications and open feedback in his Guardian blog. “Preprints can help to refocus attention where it matters – on the work itself, not where it is published. In so doing, they have the potential to revitalize the scientific enterprise”, his column reads.

“I like the idea of getting “publishing-credit” for my research proposals and other research output. Roughly speaking for every proposal I write, I write one paper less”, points out computational chemist at the University of Copenhagen Jan Jansen on explaining why he accepted the invitation to become one of RIO’s subject editors.

At the end of the day, some of RIO’s innovations couldn’t escape being challenged by some criticisms. A librarian and known extreme critic of open access journals, Jeffrey Beall questioned the freedom given to RIO’s authors to make their own choice of reviewers.

One of the RIO’s own subject editors, Ivo Grigorov, a marine scientist at the Technical University of Denmark also raised his concerns on the matter. Yet, he and our ever growing list of editors and advisory board are sticking with us:

In his turn, Ross Mounce, a postdoc at the Natural History Museum, London and a founding editor of RIO, explained how the new open access journal seeks to improve the “immensely wasteful” traditional research process in his piece on the popular LSE Impact blog.

Ross also gave a podcast interview for Beta Pleated Chic, he spoke in detail about the whole list of innovative tools and strategies.

If you know of any other press mentions or blogs about RIO Journal, please don’t hesitate to forward them to us on Twitter @RIOJournal.

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Opening-up the early stages of research – LSE blog about RIO

Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO) is now featured on the LSE Blog and here is what we shared with them.

Few like to admit it, but the traditional process of research is immensely wasteful. Inefficiency occurs in every part of the research cycle, perhaps none more so than the research proposal stage. For example, nearly 90% of EU Horizon 2020 grant proposals were rejected. Many of these proposals are extremely good works, written by teams, over many months of work. Significant effort goes into crafting research proposals, yet as research outputs in themselves, they are hugely under-utilised. After the proposals are scored and either funded or not funded, typically via closed processes, what happens to these documents? Most stay hidden, never to be seen again, regardless of whether they were funded or not

What if we treated proposals like other outputs of the research cycle: like data, like software, like research articles? What if we published proposals in a journal, regardless of whether they were funded or not, to enable the citation of ideas not yet tested, to foster collaboration, to demonstrate the quality of proposed research, and to help others see what good proposals look like…

Launched yesterday, a new journal called Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO) has been created specifically to enable and encourage the entire research cycle to be published, from start to finish, specifically including research proposals and ideas; the earliest stages that rarely get published (see the video below for more explanation).

Efficient publishing technology does away with the need for typesetting

The innovations provided by RIO journal do not stop there though. Another of the major features of the journal is its authoring, reviewing and publishing system called ARPHA for short. This system is a revolution in itself: if used fully, it eliminates the need for an outsourced typesetting process and all the associated errors that entails which frustrate authors and delay publication. It also speeds up the publishing process; no delay waiting for typesetters, and it reduces the cost of production as good typesetters charge a non-negligible sum per page.

I remember only too well getting manuscript proofs back from a different publisher and seeing that the typesetting process had converted the word ‘Phylomatic’ into ‘phlegmatic’ (see tweet above) – the latter word was not in any submitted author version! This error had been introduced by mistake during the shadowy typesetting process, something publishing companies typically keep very quiet about as it’s a remarkable inefficiency in the publishing process. Typesetting is arguably an anachronism and doesn’t need to exist if authors use tools that are specifically designed to produce structured academic outputs. Don’t take my word for this: memorably, Dr Kaveh Bazargan, who runs a high-quality, successful typesetting business (River Valley) stood-up at a conference in 2012 and said of typesetting: “It’s madness. I’m here to say I really shouldn’t be in business”.

Pensoft have cracked the authoring tools problem with a solid solution that has been successfully developed & tested with the Biodiversity Data Journal and shown to be a robust system. By combining the ARPHA publishing system, with a broad subject-scope, a philosophy of publishing the entire research cycle, and low cost open access publishing, I genuinely think RIO journal offers a distinctive and attractive option for authors, significantly better in production workflow than most other journals. Alongside Dr Daniel Mietchen, I am proud to be a founding editor of this visionary new journal.

Originally posted in the LSE Blog at:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/09/02/opening-up-the-early-stages-of-research-new-journal-rio/

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All you can publish: go à la carte with Research Ideas and Outcomes Journal (RIO)

Science is Awesome!

This is something we truly believe in at Pensoft.

But, like everything in this world, science needs funding to sustain itself. Out there, some great minds are turning countless ideas into research proposals every year, yet only a small proportion would eventually get funded.

Sadly, most of the time few get to hear about a particular idea if it gets rejected.

RIO Journal – get credit for all your work

The Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal is created to provide a positive enhancement to a frequently inefficient funding system.  

RIO publishes all outputs of the research cycle: starting from the project proposals, through to data, methods, workflows, software, project reports and research articles. And it all comes together on a single collaborative platform, encompassing all areas of academic research, including science, technology, humanities and the social sciences. Learn more about our vision in the RIO video.

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Why publish a research proposal?

Behind a proposal there’s always:

  • a good idea,
  • long hours of research
  • huge collaborative effort by scientists.

But when it comes to funding decisions, it all turns to a pile of paper with either an approval or rejection stamp on it. Wafer-thin decision margins mean that great projects often don’t get funded at the first time of asking.

We created RIO as an alternative that allows scientists to get credit for their ideas as citable publications. Thus, they can share the outcomes from the vast research effort spent on producing non-traditional research outputs such as proposals that are otherwise lost to science and society.

All published ideas and outputs on RIO have public article level metrics and comment sections – so the stamp of approval is now in the hands of the real end users: the community.

New thinking: science for society

The journal takes a step ahead with a collaborative platform that allows all ideas and outputs to be labelled with Impact Categories based upon UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and EU Societal Challenges.

These categories provide social impact-based labelling to help funders discover and finance relevant research.

Application FormAs RIO publishes research from across a wide range of disciplines, it is expected that the new Impact Category labels will help the journal to foster interdisciplinary research, allowing scientists from different fields to have their work discovered in novel-ways beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries,  providing real value for society. RIO is currently actively looking for editors from across disciplines, fill in a simple Editor Application Form and join us!

Innovation non-stop

RIO offers the most transparent, open and public peer-review process thus building trust in the reviewed outcomes.

The journal is published through ARPHA, the first publishing platform ever to support the full life cycle of a manuscript, from authoring through submission and public peer-review to publication and dissemination, within a single, fully-integrated online collaborative environment. RIO launches several innovative publishing features – a comprehensive list of these is available here.

And all that comes a-la-carte

Through RIO and ARPHA you can tailor our services towards your needs.

For a long time publishers ‘dictated the rules’ for the products and services that researchers  get. At Pensoft we believe in the opposite –  scientists, funders and communities should dictate to us their needs and we should aim to provide products and services to cover those needs.

Following this philosophy, at RIO you can choose exactly which publishing services you want according to your needs and budget.

You can write a manuscript in the RIO authoring tool, or submit it in other formats. Authors can also supply as many pre-submission reviews with your manuscript as you want and choose the style of peer-review that is appropriate for their output. They can also opt in and out from a number of additional services, such as proofreading or the services of our press office and many more. All options are available here.

Join us in the future

From the get-go Pensoft has always aimed to revolutionise the publishing field supplying authors with the latest innovations.

With RIO we are actively looking to expand. Not just in scope, by servicing all areas of academic research, including science, technology, humanities and the social sciences. But also to expand the mindset of a system haunted by old-fashioned prejudices.

RIO smashes the status-quo by publishing ALL research ideas & outcomes that constitute the research cycle, including: project proposals, data, methods, workflows, software, project reports and research articles. It’s simply a more accurate reflection of the real process of research.

All this supported by the latest innovations and tailored to your needs!

Visit the pre-launch webpage at: http://riojournal.com.