Peer review

Termcat  (The Catalan Centre for Terminology) defines expert review as the review of an article, a publication, a project, etc. undertaken by subject experts to critically assess their quality and eligibility.
In quality academic journals it is essential to have a peer review process of the submitted papers before accepting them for publication. This is known as expert review or peer review.
 
Why are journal articles reviewed?
Those responsible for publishing journals have two criteria for the acceptance of articles for publication: firstly, the general quality of the work (originality, methodology, good formal presentation, etc.) and, secondly, the eligibility of the work to the editorial line of the journal. The review aims to select the highest quality and the most innovative articles within the discipline.
 
Typology of reviews
There are different types of peer review, depending on:

  • Types of blindness, who knows who
  • Number of peer reviewers
  • Number of rounds
  • Time of review: before or after the publication

Depending on the type of blindness, reviews can be:

  • Single blind: reviewers know the identity of the authors, but the authors do not know the identity of the reviewers.
  • Double-blind: neither the authors nor the reviewers know each other, and the manuscript must be anonymous. Experts or reviewers read and analyse separately the articles evaluating ideas and results, as well as their potential impact on the world of science.
  • Open: the identity of the authors and the reviewers is known by all the participants during all the review process.

 
The role of the reviewer
The expert (reviewer or referee) is an external person who does not belong to the editorial board of the journal. With extensive knowledge in the subject of the manuscript, experts critically review them to advise the editorial board in decision making.
Reviewers should provide information about the importance of the study and its academic quality, highlight the relevance of the research, ethical considerations and give their opinion on the method used.
As a result of the peer review process, reviewers write a report with the revisions requested to the author for the article to be published.

Versions of scientific papers
Each document is alive and goes through several stages during the quality review process, with different versions of the same article:

  • Pre-print, Submitted Version: original manuscript which was submitted to the publisher for consideration before being peer-reviewed.
  • Post-print, Accepted Manuscript, Author’s final version: final version of the manuscript accepted by the journal after it has undergone peer review, which includes the changes recommended by the reviewers.
  • Published Version: final version that has been published in a journal.

Researchers are advised to keep all the versions of their document’s lifecycle. The version of the document to be deposited in a repository is subject to the publisher’s copyright and self-archiving policies.
 
Improvement options
There are several options to improve the usual peer review system. Here are some of the proposals: to pay reviewers for their work, to remove reviewers so that science is reviewed by the scientific community itself, to strengthen the double-blind review avoiding conflict of interest, and open peer review.
Of all of them, open peer review stands out because it has many potential advantages. Opening up what has traditionally been a closed process increases the chances of spotting errors, validating findings and increasing the overall trust in published outputs. Therefore, it is an important aspect of Open Science.

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