In my SOAN article last week, Open access in 2008, I mischaracterized the nature of peer review at PLoS ONE. I'm happy to post this correction from the managing editor, Peter Binfield. I'll also run it as an erratum in the next issue of SOAN.
I noticed that your 2008 roundup contained the statement "[The success of] PLoS ONE may give no comfort to publishers who perform more extensive and expensive forms of pre-publication review. (PLoS ONE combines in-house pre-publication review, limited to technical soundness, with open, communal, retroactive review on all other issues, including the paper's significance.)"
It is correct that peer review in PLoS ONE concentrates on technical (methodological and scientific) soundness, but it is incorrect to say that the peer review is conducted in-house. PLoS ONE has full, traditional, external, rigorous, Peer Review on its content prior to acceptance and as in the vast majority of journals, the peer review process in PLoS ONE is managed by the academic editorial board – currently around 750 practicing researchers who are experts in their fields - in consultation with external expert reviewers. Since launch we have used well over 9,000 external peer reviewers, and on average every published paper has been peer reviewed by 1.6 external reviewers (in addition to one of our Academic Editors, who are themselves experts in their fields). Publicly availably data for this can be found [here] and [here] as well as in several blog posts (for example: one, two, and three, etc.) where we have been interviewing authors and Academic Editors about their experiences of our peer review process.
Another issue is the statement that PLoS ONE incorporates post-publication peer review. Although the tools for adding notes, comments, ratings and questions to the articles do allow for post-publication assessment and criticism, typical activity on an article is in no way comparable to the rigorous peer review that PLoS ONE articles receive prior to acceptance.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/06/2009 03:17:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
