Diversification and Decentralization of Peer Review

A research article can be seen as a conversation between scholars. In the past this conversation took place almost exclusively between privileged colleagues, and more recently as part of the anonymous peer review process. Today technology allows this conversation to take place in the open, in forums like preprint servers, and the conversation can be ongoing with post publication commenting. There are multiple providers of “community peer review” offering various services targeted at different parts of the scholarly communications ecosystem, from preprint servers to journal peer review to post-publication commenting. These providers are not only pushing boundaries on how peer review is conducted, many are also expanding what peer reviewers look like, bringing in more diversity and working to train early career researchers. In this session we examine various types of experiments, how these services can help diversify science, and how their efforts are contributing to trust and integrity.