Call for participants: a study on Open Peer Review in OJS 3.6
Photo by PKP’s Rafael Slonik
Open peer review is coming to OJS. PKP and the ScholComm Lab are studying what editors expect, and we would like to hear from journals considering whether to use it. To take part, please complete the expression of interest form now. It takes about five minutes, and the deadline is 15 Oct 2026. If selected, you will take part in two online conversations, held between late 2026 and early 2027.
What is planned for OJS 3.6
Editors in our community have been asking about open peer review in OJS for some years. PKP development is community-led, and open peer review has been on the community’s list for some time. The requirements of Open Research Europe (ORE), which OJS has been selected to underpin, align with needs the community had already identified. As part of that work, OJS 3.6 is being developed with open peer review features to support journals considering this approach, and it is expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2026. The confirmed features are:
- comments on article versions, with tools for reporting and moderating them
- an option to have peer reviews appear publicly on the article landing page
- a built-in tool for collecting author responses to reviewer reports
- support for assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to open peer reviews
- support for post-publication peer review, built around ORE’s approach but intended as a more general toolset
- new publication version types, including Published Manuscript Under Review (PMUR)
The development work is tracked in the open peer review implementation issue in the pkp-lib repository.
No single set of tools covers the whole Open Peer Review concept, and how far a journal opens its review process, and which practices it adopts, remains an editorial decision for that journal and its community. These features give journals more options as they decide what works best for their process.
About the study
PKP is conducting the study with the Scholarly Communications Lab. This qualitative study is based on conversations with editors and aims to understand what editors need from this feature in their everyday work, and how they think authors, reviewers, and readers will respond to more open review practices.
Much of the existing research on open peer review looks at how authors and reviewers view it. Less is known about how editors of community-run journals weigh the decision to adopt it: what it would mean for a workflow they maintain themselves, for a reviewer pool they recruit personally, and for their relationship with the community the journal serves. This study focuses on those editorial decisions so their concerns can inform the feature.
Those discussions are taking place now, in editorial meetings, and they are rarely documented. Once a journal has been running open peer review for a few years, the expectations and concerns that shaped the decision are easily forgotten. This study aims to record them while the decisions are still being made so that journals can benefit from that experience.
We are asking two questions:
- What do OJS journals need and expect from the open peer review feature?
- How do journal communities in different disciplines and regions view open peer review?
The second question is why we are seeking a varied group of journals across disciplines, regions, and sizes, so the findings reflect a wide range of editorial needs and help journals see how others are approaching open peer review.
The study will run over eight to twelve months, with interviews taking place between late 2026 and early 2027. Interviews will be held in English.
Editors can decide whether they and their journals are named or anonymized, and can change that decision at any point during the study. The team will go through data protection and data use with them before the first interview, so they know how their contribution will be handled. Participants will also receive a draft of the aggregated findings before publication, so that nobody reads about their own journal for the first time in a published paper.
Who we are looking for
Editors, managing editors, and journal managers of journals running on OJS, anywhere in the world, who are at some stage of considering open peer review. That includes those who are only reading about it, those who have brought it to an editorial meeting, and those preparing or already running a pilot.
You do not need to have made a decision. Reservations are as useful to the study as enthusiasm. An editor who has looked at open peer review and concluded it would not suit their community has reasons for that, and those reasons are part of what we want to understand. The study is not an attempt to persuade anyone to adopt open peer review; it is a chance to contribute your perspective.
Not everyone who expresses interest will be interviewed, and selection will depend in part on who else comes forward.
How to express your interest
Please complete the expression of interest form by October 15, 2026. It takes about five minutes and asks about your journal, the version of OJS you run, and where you are in your thinking about open peer review. This is the next step if you would like to be considered, and it does not commit you to taking part.
The team will contact selected editors shortly after that with full study details and a consent form.
If you know other OJS editors who are considering open peer review, please pass this call on to them.
Questions about the study can be sent to sarah.wendt@hu-berlin.de.