In broad daylight: Innovation and transparency in peer review

Independent peer review is one of the foundations of scholarship and a practice that has been in place in the academy for centuries. This panel will address innovations that promote transparency and accelerate the pace of research, such as post-publication review, open peer review, and research evaluation ethics, exploring questions such as:

   • Who qualifies as a peer reviewer? 
   • What kinds of content should be reviewed? Datasets? Editorials? 
   • What are the strengths and weaknesses of pre-publication vs. post-publication peer review? 
   • Is open peer review integrated with the formal publication process? Does it need to be?
   • What concerns are there with making peer review open? Are there benefits to anonymity, for example? 
   • How do we ensure productive and civil discourse in a public review process? 
   • How do these innovations change the relationship between the reviewer and the author? 
   • Is it important to address the novelty and significance of the research in the review, or should it be only about      content and soundness? 
   • What is the anticipated trajectory of these changes in peer review and how might they affect research 25      years from now? 

Moderator: Jackie Smith, Professor of Sociology and editor, 
Journal of World-Systems Research

Panelists:
Brandon Stell, PubPeer; 
Larry Kane, University of Pittsburgh, F1000 Research;
Lenny Teytelman, Protocols.io; 
Josh Nicholson, The Winnower

About the panelists: 
  Larry Kane is Associate Professor in the Dept. of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh. As a member of the Faculty of 1000, Dr. Kane is avid contributor to F1000Prime and F1000Research, and is an advocate for innovation in the peer review process to accelerate the dissemination of research. F1000Research (f1000research.com) is an Open Science publishing platform offering immediate publication of posters, slides and articles with no editorial bias. All articles benefit from transparent peer review and the inclusion 
of all source data. 

  Josh Nicholson is the founder of The Winnower, an open scholarly publishing platform launched in 2014. The Winnower acts as a publisher and archiver for a variety of content (research,reddit AMAs, student essays, journal club proceedings, peer reviews, open letters, grants, etc.) and to-date has published over 600 articles. Nicholson received his PhD in cell biology in 2015 from Virginia Tech. He has authored numerous articles on scientific funding and publishing in addition to his research on cancer, some of which have been discussed in The Economist, The Boston Globe and other major news outlets.

  Brandon Stell is a neuroscientist and team leader at the French national science organization CNRS in Paris and is the President of the PubPeer Foundation. PubPeer (pubpeer.com) is an anonymous online forum for post-publication peer review where scholars can comment on any article published with a DOI. The authors of the paper are invited to engage with the commenters. 

  Lenny Teytelman is a geneticist and computational biologist. Since 2012, he has devoted himself to creating protocols.io: a free and up-to-date central repository of life science methods. As cofounder of protocols.io Lenny brings a strong passion for sharing science and improving research efficiency through technology.