What if you could peer review the arXiv?

What is the arXiv?

The arXiv is a server that hosts ‘eprints’ or ‘preprints’ of research papers, and is a key publishing platform for many fields, particularly physics and mathematics. Founded back in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg, it currently hosts over 1 million research articles, with more than 8000 submissions per month!

Despite now being in the running for 25 years, the arXiv still represents one of the greatest technological innovations to utilise the Web for scholarly communication.

While the majority of the content submitted to the arXiv is subsequently also submitted to traditional journals for publication, there is still content which never goes beyond its confines. Irrespective of this, communities engaged with the arXiv still cite articles published there, whether or not they have been formally published in a journal elsewhere.

This is the whole purpose of the arXiv: to facilitate rapid peer-to-peer communication so that science accelerates faster. The fact that all articles are publicly available is incidental, and just happens to be a topic of major interest with the growing open access movement.

However, the arXiv is not peer reviewed in the formal sense. It is moderated, so that junk submissions can be removed, or manuscripts recategorised, but it lacks the additional layer of quality control of traditional peer review.

So while some might think this poses a risk, ask yourself this question: do you re-use articles critical to your research without making sure that you have checked and understand the research to a sufficient degree that you can appropriately cite it? Because that’s peer review, that is, and it applies irrespective of whether an article has already been peer reviewed or not.

How do you peer review the arXiv?

However, the arXiv does not have an in house commenting or peer review function on the platform, unlike other pre-print servers like biorXiv or PeerJ Pre-prints.

Here at ScienceOpen, we have almost the entire arXiv (~90%, minus the earliest submissions) on our platform. This is updated periodically in order to bring in new submissions, so all the latest research is right there, among 11 million article records and full text articles.

Each one of those articles is open to a host of actions, such as commenting, sharing, or recommending. Most importantly though, each one is open to ‘post-publication peer review’, which could even be considered pre-publication peer review depending on whether or not you view a pre-print as ‘published’.

We provide full credit and transparency for each peer review conducted on our platform. Peer review is already a service carried out for free for many publishers, so why not conduct it openly as part of a community and get recognition for your work?

The role of Collections

However, peer reviewing the arXiv is a mammoth task for any individual or community. What is needed is a way for Editors to collate similarly-themed articles together, and invite colleagues to review those articles as a community, openly and with civility.

Well, there’s an app for that.

By building a ScienceOpen Collection, an Editor or group of Editors can group together articles that they find interesting, and open up all articles to post-publication peer review.

Essentially, this decouples peer review and the communication of research from the formal publishing process. Depending on which parts of this process you value the most, this is an incredibly efficient way of maximising the efficiency of research verification and communication.

How different is this to an ‘overlay journal’?

Recently, Tim Gowers of the University of Cambridge launched an overlay journal known as Discrete Analysis. This is a journal published by Scholastica that simply conducts peer review as a community, and is based on articles submitted by authors from the arXiv, which it ‘piggybacks’ off. After undergoing peer review, updated versions are added to the arXiv (version control is awesome), and links to those ‘published’ and peer reviewed articles provided on the platform, along with editorial summaries. Others have since followed suit, including the launch of the Open Journal of Astrophysics, seeing the value of these sorts of publishing models.

Well, this is essentially the same process as a ScienceOpen Collection. The major difference is that we already have the pretty much the whole arXiv on our platform! After undergoing peer review, articles can be resubmitted to the arXiv, which allows full version control, and then reintegrated into ScienceOpen and updated in their relevant Collection.

With this, the Editor of a Collection can then simply affix a ‘peer review’ or ‘published’ comment to the article, and bam. Done. It’s open, it’s transparent, it’s creditable, and most importantly it’s completely free! No charges, not to readers, not to authors, not to anyone.

Researchers, if they wish, can also leave a comment on their arXiv articles on ScienceOpen with a link to where it is finally published in a journal, in order to offer more credibility to the articles posted there.

The only constraint to all of this is the content of the arXiv. The scope of Collections is defined by the Editor and the needs of their communities. But even then, there is absolutely nothing stopping Collections drawing upon the full corpus of 11 million articles and full text records archived within ScienceOpen, which could potentially vastly increase their value. It’s all down to what you want to build.

Why should you bother?

Traditional peer review is biased, opaque, and non-incentivised. By peer reviewing articles from the arXiv on ScienceOpen, you are committing to objective, open, and transparent peer review, which we give you full credit for by integrating reviews with ORCID through CrossRef.

Apart from this, there is extremely little that is different to conventional journal publishing. Peer review is the same, articles are the same, you still get all the credit, but everything is done by and for research communities. There is no ‘creaming off the top’, no money exchanged, and academics retain all the rights in an open and transparent framework.

With great initiatives like Discrete Analysis showing that such a model like this can work and generate uptake from research communities, there is little reason why such opportunities should not be available to everyone. This is what ScienceOpen Collections are for. What they provide are alternative models of academic publishing to traditional systems that operate much more cheaply and efficiently (i.e., free and instantaneous with us).

The only difference to this and traditional publishing is the mark of prestige that some researchers think journals confer on their work, along with the dreaded impact factor, as a measure or proxy for the quality of articles. At ScienceOpen, we believe that the quality of research can only be assessed at the article level, and to that end have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. Instead, with Collections the quality of articles is dictated by the digestion and re-use of content within communities, and the contribution to the progress of science in an open manner. Which of those do you think is of more value?

The only final question is, if you have peer review, and you have Open Access, why would you need to submit arXiv articles anywhere else?