Herbert Van de Sompel, Certification in a digital era, Nature, June 2006. A contribution to the Naturedebate on peer review. An updated look at what are sometimes called overlay journals, which apply peer review to articles already on deposit in OA repositories. Excerpt:
A core inspiration [of his Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team at LANL] is that the digital environment allows for (indeed, requires) systemic changes in scholarly communication procedures. This potential for fundamental change is related to two properties of the digital environment that were unavailable in the paper world. First, the core functions of our scholarly communication system can be separated (at least theoretically) in the digital environment1. Second, we will be able to record in a machine-readable form, then aggregate, and later data-mine the collection of events of this system.
One line of investigation led us to define a framework in which peer review is an autonomous service overlaid on scholarly repositories hosting unreviewed manuscripts, with the repositories and reviewing services linked together for an integrated view of the distributed information. Another effort automatically identifies possible reviewers based on extractable information from the digital environment, such as a manuscript’s subject area and citation pattern, and the existing body of literature in the subject area....
The digital, networked environment allows for the functions of scholarly communication to be individually implemented by multiple parties in different ways, and then combined as alternative or companion services in what can effectively be regarded as a network-based value chain. This may seem far-fetched, but examples of such deconstructed value chains are already emerging....
Add to this the ability to track the use of digital manuscripts, and even to aggregate such usage information across distributed systems, combined with the intriguing correlations between readership counts and citation counts, and one can imagine the emergence of some new facet of certification provided by readership information. Collaborative environments in which peers can grade each other's manuscripts (like viewers rating movies in the Internet-based Netflix movie-rental system) could provide yet another certification indicator....Especially intriguing is whether automatically extractable quality metrics could be used as parallel facets of certification. If so, could such metrics be less prone to deficiencies resulting from the human-driven nature of peer review? Understanding that most, if not all, papers get published somewhere, could such automated metrics be more indicative of the actual quality of manuscripts?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/06/2006 10:33:00 AM.
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.
