Author: RIO Editorial Office

Most funding agencies now require researchers to specify and think about the broader, societal impacts of their proposed research. This makes a lot of sense, since approximately 80% of research is publicly-funded either by governments or charities.

Thus, the outputs of most academic research should ideally make some kind of contribution towards wider societal impact, even if tenuous or long-term.

Here at RIO, we don’t think the potential societal impact of research is well surfaced by most traditional journals, and this is something we’d like to improve upon. So, as one of the many innovative features of RIO, we’re going to experiment with social impact labelling and categorization of research outputs based upon internationally-recognised external criteria such as the EU Societal Challenges (the priorities of EU Horizon 2020 funding), and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Recognizing that the mapping of a given piece of research to such impact categories may be difficult at times, we strongly encourage the use of this feature, but do not require it.

More detail about the UN SDGs is available at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/partnerships . This image is copyright of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Permission for re-use is granted by the UN.

How will it work, in practice?

Authors will have the option to choose societal impact badges from a preset list provided by RIO (see the Filter image for an example). The badges indicate impact categories that are or may be relevant to their submitted work. Reviewers and editors can assess the appropriateness of these badges, and if accepted, these badges will be pinned on the published output, so that they are clearly seen on the landing page of the work.

Why?

We think this will benefit authors, readers and funders of research.

1. For Authors: It will better advertise the intended societal impact of their work – sometimes this can be quite indirect, so we think this expressive labelling will aid the recognition of potential social impact.
2. For Readers: It will hopefully encourage more interdisciplinary reading. When searching for work relevant to ‘Zero Hunger’ (SDG #2), articles from vastly disparate subject areas will be more cohesively surfaced: social sciences, biology, chemistry, and engineering may all be relevant here, amongst others. Outputs from these different disciplines will no longer be siloed away from each other in vastly different journals.
3. For Funders: Interesting research outputs that are relevant to specific societal challenges, some of which may be ideas not yet funded(!) may now be more clearly and relevantly presented.

Enabling the filtering of a diverse range of research ideas and outcomes by societal impact is thus clearly desirable, and while RIO is the first to implement such a system, we would encourage the wider community to join us in highlighting the connection between research and societal impact more systematically.

Do you want the potential societal impact of your research to be more clearly signalled to the world upon publication? Submit your research to Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO) – we’ll start accepting submissions in November.  

P.S. The RIO team listens to constructive feedback on the journal from the global community. We are therefore delighted to acknowledge and thank our advisory board member Susan Reilly (LIBER) and Stuart Hamilton (IFLA) for emphasising the UN Societal Development Goals. We have taken that on board and will be using these and other internationally recognised societal goals as the basis for societal impact labelling at RIO.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.