Taylor & Francis survey: authors value rigorous peer review, even if it takes time

Fri, May 03, 2013 11:06 CET

Oxford, April 2013

In the sixth in a series of Press Releases on the themes and findings of the Open Access Survey, Taylor & Francis investigates authors’ preferred methods of peer review suitable for their research. Taylor & Francis / Routledge journals, including those that are part of the Open programme, benefit from Editor-led rigorous peer review and we wanted to understand the value and importance of this service to our author base.

Authors’ views on the peer review process

Respondents were asked about the kind of peer review they find the most suitable for their research when publishing an open access article.

Findings from the survey show that 45% of all respondents would ‘always’ value a ‘rigorous assessment of the merit and novelty of their article with constructive comments for its improvement’. Adding those who would ‘often’ prefer this more traditional style of peer review takes this figure up to 78%.

Moving down the scale of rigour, to peer review that ‘reviews the technical soundness of my research without any judgement on its novelty or interest’, there is a huge fall in support; only 11% of authors would ‘always’ find this suitable for their Open Access articles. Similarly the number of supporters for an ‘accelerated peer review [process] with fewer rounds of revision’ shrinks, with only 9% of respondents ‘always’ accepting this method. And lastly, only 7% of respondents would ‘always’ find ‘post-publication peer review after a basic check by invited reviewers’ appropriate. In fact, more than a quarter of authors would ‘never’ value ‘post-publication peer review’; contrastingly, the number of those who answered ‘never’ to traditional peer review was too small to plot on the chart.

Regional and Subject Differences

Across all subjects and regions, the majority of authors felt that rigorous peer review would be the most suitable refereeing style for the bulk of their OA research papers (selecting ‘always’ or ‘often’). Authors from Library and Information Science seem least wedded to the traditional style of peer review but even here 72% of authors said they would ‘always’ or ‘often’ find this rigorous peer review suitable for their OA articles.

Peer review in the style of PLoS One, which ‘reviews the technical soundness of my research without any judgement on its novelty or interest’, is the second most popular type of review for most subject areas, finding the largest level of support from Library and Information Scientists (50% choosing ‘always’ or ‘often’).

‘Accelerated peer review [process] with fewer rounds of revision in (the style of eLIfe)’ was the second most popular form of peer review in seven subject areas, most notably Business and Economics where 41% of respondents chose ‘always’ or ‘often’ for this option.

‘Post-publication peer review’ in the style of f1000 Research found most favour from authors in Chemistry and Materials Science, where it saw a similar level of support as the other two types of alternative peer review models (33-37% selecting ‘always’ or ‘often’).

Authors from Asia, the Middle East and Africa were slightly more supportive of all the alternative forms of peer review but only those from the Middle East and Asia showed a corresponding decrease in support for rigorous peer review. However, this still came out as the most popular type of review in both of these regions.

This press release is accompanied by Supplement 5 to the original report – which examines the subject, regional and country-level variations for each question regarding peer review in full:

www.tandf.co.uk/journals/explore/open-access-survey-supp5.pdf

You can find the basic results, the full survey and all the subject and regional data supplements at our OA survey homepage:

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/openaccess/opensurvey

Visit our newsroom at: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/press-releases

For more information, please contact:
Victoria Wright, Communications Manager, Taylor & Francis Group Journals
email: victoria.wright@tandf.co.uk

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About Taylor & Francis Group

Taylor & Francis Group partners with researchers, scholarly societies, universities and libraries worldwide to bring knowledge to life. As one of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly journals, books, ebooks and reference works our content spans all areas of Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Science, and Technology and Medicine.

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