Scientists, not publishers, are in the best position to develop a fair evaluation process for scientific papers. (…) “Peer reviews should be made public information, like the scientific papers themselves.” (says Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Univesity of Cambridge, UK).
Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Alexander Walther, both working at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK and Diana Deca, of the Institute of Neuroscience, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany, on open evaluation as next step of scientific publishing:
Evaluation steers the attention of the scientific community, and thus the very course of science. (…) Evaluation, therefore, is at the heart of the entire endeavor of science. As the number of scientific publications explodes, evaluation, and selection will only gain importance. A grand challenge of our time, therefore, is to design the future system, by which we evaluate papers and decide which ones deserve broad attention and deep reading. However, it is unclear how exactly OE and the future system for scientific publishing should work. This motivated us to edit the Research Topic “Beyond open access: visions for open evaluation of scientific papers by post-publication peer review” in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. The Research Topic includes 18 papers, each going beyond mere criticism of the status quo and laying out a detailed vision for the ideal future system. The authors are from a wide variety of disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, medicine, molecular biology, chemistry, and economics.