Let the crowd be my peers? How researchers assess the prospects of social peer review

While Internet technologies have provided social networks for researchers as more open means to make their work available to other scholars, the traditionally closed, peer review-based publishing process has remained nearly untouched. We ask researchers about their intention to go one step further and use social peer review (SPR), which enables them to directly publish their work within a web-based social network, where, instead of the traditional pre-publication peer review, it can be evaluated and critiqued by the entire academic community. Based on a sample of 1429 international scholars from various fields and by drawing upon adoption and institutional theory, this study seeks to identify scientists’ motivational drivers for engaging in this new forms of scholarly communication. We find that the adoption of SPR is driven more by extrinsic factors than by researchers’ intrinsic motivation or normative influences to make science more open. Further challenges for SPR are low scores on the most relevant performance criteria, as well as low acceptance by established scientists. However, rather than a substitute, SPR is well perceived as a possible supplement to the traditional peer-based review system.