Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are used to maintain quality standards, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication. Peer review can be categorized by the type of activity and by the field or profession in which the activity occurs, e.g., medical peer review. It can also be used as a teaching tool to help students improve writing assignments.
In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by sharing findings from research with readers. They are normally specialized based on discipline, with authors picking which one they send their manuscripts to.
The International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) was a creationism advocacy organization that described itself as "a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism." It was founded and led by figures associated with the intelligent design movement, such as William A. Dembski and Michael Behe.
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or thesis. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
Scientific literature comprises academic papers that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences. Within a field of research, relevant papers are often referred to as "the literature". Academic publishing is the process of contributing the results of one's research into the literature, which often requires a peer-review process.
BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open access science publisher. It was founded in 2000 and has been owned by Springer, now Springer Nature, since 2008.
Nature Medicine is a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal published by Nature Portfolio covering all aspects of medicine. It was established in 1995. The journal seeks to publish research papers that "demonstrate novel insight into disease processes, with direct evidence of the physiological relevance of the results". As with other Nature journals, there is no external editorial board, with editorial decisions being made by an in-house team, although peer review by external expert referees forms a part of the review process. The editor-in-chief is João Monteiro.
PLOS One is a peer-reviewed open access mega journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, formerly director of the National Institutes of Health and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University; and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The Journal of Neuroendocrinology, first published in 1989 is an academic journal that mainly publishes reports of original research in the field of neuroendocrinology, along with occasional review articles; it claims to provide "the principal international focus for the newest ideas in classical neuroendocrinology and its expanding interface with the regulation of behavioural, cognitive, developmental, degenerative and metabolic processes."
Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use." This primarily involves the publication of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and conference papers.
A review article is an article that summarizes the current state of understanding on a topic within a certain discipline. A review article is generally considered a secondary source since it may analyze and discuss the method and conclusions in previously published studies. It resembles a survey article or, in news publishing, overview article, which also surveys and summarizes previously published primary and secondary sources, instead of reporting new facts and results. Survey articles are however considered tertiary sources, since they do not provide additional analysis and synthesis of new conclusions. A review of such sources is often referred to as a tertiary review.
Open peer review is the various possible modifications of the traditional scholarly peer review process. The three most common modifications to which the term is applied are:
- Open identities: Authors and reviewers are aware of each other's identity.
- Open reports: Review reports are published alongside the relevant article.
- Open participation: The wider community are able to contribute to the review process.
Nature Communications is a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio since 2010. It is a multidisciplinary journal that covers the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, earth sciences, medicine, and biology. The journal has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.
Scholarly peer review or academic peer review is the process of having a draft version of a researcher's methods and findings reviewed by experts in the same field. Peer review is widely used for helping the academic publisher decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph or in the proceedings of an academic conference. If the identities of authors are not revealed to each other, the procedure is called dual-anonymous peer review.
PsychOpen is a European open-access publishing platform for psychology operated by the research support organization Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID), which combines traditional scientific and Internet-based publishing. PsychOpen aims to foster the visibility of psychological research in Europe and beyond, and to ensure free access to research for scholars and professionals in the field.
Peerage of Science was a scientific peer review service aimed at improving "the current peer review system and make the peer review process more scientific, fair and transparent". The company was founded in 2011 by the scientists Janne Kotiaho, Mikko Mönkkönen, and Janne-Tuomas Seppänen in Jyväskylä, Finland. Initially it focused on the areas of "ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation biology", but within 2 years it expanded to other areas of science.
AoB Plants (AoBP) is a peer-reviewed open-access, non-profit scientific journal established in 2009 and publishing on all aspects of plant biology. The editor-in-chief is Tom Buckley and the journal is published through Oxford University Press but owned and managed by the Annals of Botany Company a non-profit educational charity registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales. AoBP was one of the first plant science journals to adopt a fully open access publishing model. AoBP is one of few plant science journals that use double-blind peer review ; its "sound-science ethos and mission" statement reads, "The mission of AoBP is to provide an outlet for plant-focused research without the biases that affect much of scientific publishing. These biases include the devaluing of confirmatory or negative results and prejudices against authors based on their personal characteristics. Thus, we base decisions to accept or reject papers solely on rigor, clarity and substance, and we use double-blind peer review, concealing the identities of authors and reviewers during the review process. We prefer to leave judgments about the wider importance of papers to the scientific community." An account of the thinking behind launching the journal and its progress over the first 10 years has been published. AoB Plants has two sister journals, Annals of Botany, a subscription-based general botanical journal and in silico Plants, an open access journal devoted to all aspects of plant modelling.
ANU Press is a new university press (NUP) that publishes open-access books, textbooks and journals. It was established in 2004 to explore and enable new modes of scholarly publishing. In 2014, ANU E Press changed its name to ANU Press to reflect the changes the publication industry had seen since its foundation.
The Annual Review of Cancer Biology is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes review articles about oncology. It published its first volume in 2017, making it the 47th journal published by the nonprofit Annual Reviews. Founded by Tyler Jacks and Charles L. Sawyers, it is currently edited by Laura Attardi and Scott A. Armstrong. It is content is broadly focused on cancer cell biology, tumorigenesis and cancer progression, and translational cancer science. As of 2020, Annual Review of Cancer Biology has been published open access under the Subscribe to Open (S2O) publishing model.
Peer Community in (PCI) is a non-profit scientific organization that offers an editorial process of open science by creating specific communities of researchers reviewing and recommending preprints in their field. Since 2021, a new journal, Peer Community Journal, publishes recommended preprints.
