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PKP Copenhagen 2023 Sprint Notes released: Public Peer Review 

By PKP Copenhagen Sprint Working Group "Public Peer Review" / PKP Communications
Thirty plus community members from around the world gather at the PKP Copenhagen 2023 Sprint to work on PKP software. The group is spread out into three rows with some people standing in the back, and some people sitting in the front. The group is highly diverse, coming from different countries, backgrounds, expertise, and organizations. The photo is in black and white, with the projector screen in the background and the springing tables with chairs in the foreground. The Crossref (sponsor) and Royal Danish Library (host) logos are in the lower right; the PKP 25 year anniversary logo is in the lower left. The main message is about the PKP Copenhagen 2023 sprint notes about Public Peer Review

The fifth set of sprint notes is now available from the PKP Copenhagen Sprint, hosted by the Royal Danish Library in June 2023.

Sprints involve PKP community members coming together in diverse groups to work on PKP software and support. The Royal Danish Library hosted eight working groups at the PKP Copenhagen Sprint last June. This is a summary of one such group’s work.

Group Members

  • Alec Smecher, PKP
  • Jarda Kotěšovec, PKP
  • Radek Gomola, Masaryk University Press
  • Catherine Jex, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS)
  • Clinton Graham, University of Pittsburgh
  • Tom Granroth, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies
  • Jyrki Heinonen, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies

Goal

  • Expose peer review data alongside journal content.
    • Increases the transparency of the workflow.
    • We already collect all the necessary data in the existing peer review process.
    • Lots of people are asking for it (editors)!
    • Open Science guidelines ask for it!
    • PKP just hasn’t had the chance to implement something. Let’s do something.
    • We are not working from a specific use case, so the result will probably not be perfect for a particular user, but extending it with more/different data will be easy.
  • Sidebars (things we also did with the group).
    • Learn about plugins, extensibility, and approach to problem-solving when coding for PKP software.

Subgoal: Define what we mean by public/open peer review

“Open peer review” means a lot of different things to different people.

  • Do we mean open commenting on an article?
    • Curated reviews/reviewers? Or public commenting?
  • Do we mean author/reviewer names are visible to each other?
    • OJS already supports this.

There are other groups working on vocabularies; let’s adopt these when available for consistency.

The group chose to focus on curated reviews, per the existing OJS review system but presented for public consumption with the published content. This means:

  • We use the existing OJS review workflow, unchanged.
  • We rely on the data already captured by the OJS workflow.
  • When a submission is published, we present the review data along with the submission.

Working Space

Git repository: https://github.com/asmecher/publicReviews

Results

We wrote a working proof of concept plugin.

Article landing page

On the right-hand sidebar for a published article, review rounds and reviewer names are also published:

Screen shot of the OJS Article landing page where review rounds and reviewer names are also published

Each of the links on a reviewer’s name can be clicked to present more information about that review.

Peer Review

Clicking the links above presents more information about that individual review: the reviewer’s name, the date of review completion, and the reviewer’s comments. (The example data here is very sparse.)

Screenshot of the new feature, showing more information about the review:the reviewer’s name, the date of review completion, and the reviewer’s comments.

The Group had to make many assumptions about this part of the proof-of-concept; we imagine that groups wanting to make use of this plugin will probably want to adjust the template to add more details.