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Peer review and preprint policies are unclear at most major journals

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas Klebel
  • Stefan Reichmann
  • Jessica Polka
  • Gary McDowell
  • Naomi Penfold
  • Samantha Hindle
  • Tony Ross-Hellauer

Abstract

Clear and findable publishing policies are important for authors to choose appropriate journals for publication. We investigated the clarity of policies of 171 major academic journals across disciplines regarding peer review and preprinting. 31.6% of journals surveyed do not provide information on the type of peer review they use. Information on whether preprints can be posted or not is unclear in 39.2% of journals. 58.5% of journals offer no clear information on whether reviewer identities are revealed to authors. Around 75% of journals have no clear policy on co-reviewing, citation of preprints, and publication of reviewer identities. Information regarding practices of open peer review is even more scarce, with

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas Klebel & Stefan Reichmann & Jessica Polka & Gary McDowell & Naomi Penfold & Samantha Hindle & Tony Ross-Hellauer, 2020. "Peer review and preprint policies are unclear at most major journals," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(10), pages 1-19, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0239518
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0239518
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. B Ian Hutchins & Xin Yuan & James M Anderson & George M Santangelo, 2016. "Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level," PLOS Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(9), pages 1-25, September.
    2. Jenny Fry & Valérie Spezi & Stephen Probets & Claire Creaser, 2016. "Towards an understanding of the relationship between disciplinary research cultures and open access repository behaviors," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(11), pages 2710-2724, November.
    3. B. Preedip Balaji & M. Dhanamjaya, 2019. "Preprints in Scholarly Communication: Re-Imagining Metrics and Infrastructures," Publications, MDPI, vol. 7(1), pages 1-23, January.
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    Cited by:

    1. Hamilton, Daniel George & Fraser, Hannah & Hoekstra, Rink & Fidler, Fiona, 2020. "Journal policies and editors’ opinions on peer review," MetaArXiv qkjy4, Center for Open Science.
    2. Sun, Zhuanlan, 2024. "Textual features of peer review predict top-cited papers: An interpretable machine learning perspective," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2).
    3. Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher & Tamara Heck & Kerstin Schoch, 2023. "Open Editors: A dataset of scholarly journals’ editorial board positions," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 32(2), pages 228-243.
    4. Hamilton, Daniel George & Fraser, Hannah & Hoekstra, Rink & Fidler, Fiona, 2020. "Journal policies and editors’ opinions on peer review," MetaArXiv qkjy4_v1, Center for Open Science.
    5. Rong Ni & Ludo Waltman, 2024. "To preprint or not to preprint: A global researcher survey," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 75(6), pages 749-766, June.

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