CaitlinDear Fellow Researchers,
For the past year, We (your academic & science enthusiast colleagues) have been crafting a study to re-design the peer review experience!
We are all too familiar with the frustrations of the current peer review & publishing tradition. We are not the first to try to make a change. But we ARE bringing you a pilot study with a novel model of reviewer to author interactions: one designed to probe its potential for further expansion and iteration, until we find, as a community, an experience that brings scientists together in shining light on each other’s discoveries.
The change is quite simple: to create a digital environment that facilitates the feeling of editing, commenting, and discussing a colleague’s manuscript directly, outside of journal intervention & interests. We call this process Peer Improvement.
Under the Peer Improvement ethos of scientific publishing:The task of the Reviewer is to provide a public service to your fellow scientists.
- First to the Authors of the work: to give them your best input in helping their science stay truthful while showcasing its value.
- Then to the scientific readership: to help fellow researchers find discoveries that could best facilitate their ongoing endeavors.
- And to oneself: an opportunity to interact with a colleague’s work without journal intervention or interests.
The task of the Author is to accept the Reviewer’s good faith feedback with openness and a willingness to improve.
- Consider the rewording of conclusions that better align with the data.
- Address limitations & Discuss alternative approaches that could be implemented in follow up work.
- Endeavor to make your next study be of even higher quality than the current.
What we are hoping to achieve with the Peer Improvement mindset of approaching manuscript review, is to create organic Stacks of Discoveries that can be Curated to the interests of individual scientists - by subject matter, work quality, reproducibility - and thus better serve the scientific community longitudinally in fostering equity, reproducibility, transparency, and collaboration.
The Discovery Stack Pilot is part of the longer term campaign of Discovery Stack / Discovery Curator, a project we foresee will take several years to completion.
To implement this campaign step by step, we are currently bringing to you the first step:
the Discovery Stack Pilot - where we will test the model and measure our results.
The DS/DC team had our first Idea Engine team meeting in July 2023, exactly one year ago! And now, we are so happy to announce that the pilot is ready for implementation!
NOW is the time to SIGN UP for the Discovery Stack Pilot!
If you have already signed up, we Thank you for your patience and faith in us in having enrolled since winter or spring. Please be on the lookout for official participant emails from discoverystack@solvingfor.org
If you know someone in your circle who is passionate about improving the academic publishing culture, please pass the news along!
Thank you for reading. We look forward to working with you on this exciting project. Let’s work together to make peer review what we all wish it to be!