Open Access: Peer Review

It is commonly, if not universally, accepted that for an article to be considered scholarly, it must not only be written by one or more scholars, for an audience of scholars, it must also be peer reviewed. Exceptions are made for equivalently rigorous editorial board review. 

It is also understood that high quality scholarly journals are selective of the articles that they publish, and that due to high standards and intense competition, the best journals generally reject more articles submitted than the next tier down. 

Gold Road Open Access journals are peer reviewed and have selection criteria. In fact, the determining factor for whether a purportedly Open Access journal is actually "Fauxpen Access" is indiscriminate selection and shoddy peer review. (Librarian Jeffrey Beall of University of Colorado at Denver maintains an ongoing list of fraudulent open access publishers and journals on his blog, Scholarly Open Access.) 

Actual Open Access journals are scholarly and have the same selection standards and peer review processes as conventionally published scholarly journals. An article from an Open Access journal must be judged by the same criteria that an article from a conventionally published journal is judged; the mere fact that it is Open Access should not be counted against it in any way. 

What about Green (and Silver and Platinum) Road Open Access articles, which are published in other journals and copies put up on web sites or repositories? 

It is important to determine whether the Open Access version of the article is a preprint or a postprint. The preprint is not the peer reviewed version; the postprint is. If you have the postprint, it does not matter that you "only got it from the web." It is the exact same content as what you would have found in the journal, just with different typesetting. If it was published in a top-tier journal, then the postprint found on the web is a top-tier article. (Of course, each article must still be judged on its own merits.)

If what you have access to is the preprint, and you find it valuable enough to cite in something that you will publish, you may need to obtain a copy of the peer reviewed version from the non-Open journal. You can do this by requesting it via Interlibrary Loan, going to a library that has that journal in their bound periodicals section, or using commercial document delivery services. 

Fortunately for student researchers and scholars who are reading the literature to keep up in their field or to determine whether a an article is worth citing in their own work, major problems with the substance of an article cause the article to be rejected by peer reviewers, so the article is never published at all. The differences between the preprint and published version may be important, but they will not change the basic information or meaning. 

Peer review is a voluntary system, but organizing and maintaining that systems incurs costs. These costs are incurred by the journal, whether conventionally published or Gold Road Open Access. In conventionally published journals, the costs are passed onto the reader or the library. In Open Access journals, the costs are passed onto the author. Platinum and Diamond Road Open Access do not pass the costs on to either the reader or the writer.

In Platinum Road Open Access, membership dues, donations or tax dollars pay the costs of running a journal, which includes supporting the peer review process. Like Goad Road journals, Platinum Road journals are peer reviewed and their articles should be held to the same standards as conventionally published journals. Their being Open Access shouldn't be counted as a demerit.

In Diamond Road Open Access, overlay journals are created using pre-existing content, mainly preprints which are not peer reviewed. Diamond Road overlay journals sustain their own process of peer review using entirely volunteer labor from scholars within the discipline. 

Diamond Road Open Access journals are also peer reviewed and should be considered on par with comparable conventionally published journals. However, it should be noted that the costs of orchestrating peer review were not eliminated; they were just paid by either subscription fees or author fees to the original journal in which the article was published. 

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some scientific journals began to experiment with variations on traditional double-blind peer review, as a result of criticisms of the traditional system's weaknesses and biases. In general, what they did was eliminate the double-blind in order to make reviewers accountable for their errors, and to allow people to decide whether a reviewer's opinion might be biased due to that reviewer's relationship, competition, or other interests with the article's author. They also opened up review to more than just invited peer reviewers, and made all of this visible to the reader in a separate version from the final published version of the article.

This is still far from a widespread practice, but it does persist to this day and has grown somewhat. Journals have found that open peer review had some difficulty finding peer reviewers at the beginning because they were intimidated by the prospect of having to attach their names to their opinions, but that problem diminished over time. Authors typically felt that the reviews they got from named reviewers were as or more constructive than from anonymous reviewers.  

Open Peer Review, while far from wide spread at present, and not at all integral to Open Access as it stands, is a possible ally for Diamond Road Open Access. 

Diamond Road charges neither the reader nor the author, and does not rely on traditional journals. Instead, Diamond Road "overlay journals" are compiled from the contents of article repositories. Currently most articles in repositories are already published in conventional and Gold Road journals. The question remains how Diamond Road overlay journals could ever exist without depending on the selection and peer review orchestration done by those journals, which is paid for by authors and readers. In other words, can Diamond Road ever be truly free to authors and readers, rather than just charging them indirectly? 

With Open Peer Review, Diamond Road Open Access could allow collaborative selection of articles from repositories, and orchestration of the peer review process for those articles. A journal in this mode would be less a publication and more of a community organized around a topic of interest, engaged in ongoing selection, evaluation, discussion, and dissemination of articles about that topic. This actually resembles how journals original emerged from the papers circulated among learned societies centuries ago.