peer reviews on-line or peer community?

Nature (or more precisely some researchers through Nature, associated with the UK Wellcome Trust, the US Howard Hughes Medical Institute (hhmo), and ASAPbio) has (have) launched a call for publishing reviews next to accept papers, one way or another, which is something I (and many others) have supported for quite a while. Including for rejected papers, not only because making these reviews public diminishes on principle the time involved in re-reviewing re-submitted papers but also because this should induce authors to revise papers with obvious flaws and missing references (?). Or abstain from re-submitting. Or publish a rejoinder addressing the criticisms. Anything that increases the communication between all parties, as well as the perspectives on a given paper. (This year, NIPS allows for the posting of reviews of rejected submissions, which I find a positive trend!)

In connection with this entry, I am still most sorry that I could not pursue the [superior in my opinion] project of Peer Community in computational statistics, for the time requested by Biometrika editing is just too important [given my current stamina!] for me to handle another journal (or the better alternative to a journal!). I hope someone else can take over the project and create the editorial team needed to run it.

And yet again in connection with this post (!), Andrew posted an announcement about the launch of res3archers.one, an on-line publication forum launched by Harry Crane and Ryan Martin, where the authors handle the peer review process from A to Z, including choosing the reviewers, whose reviews may be public or not, taken into account or not. Once published, the papers are open to comments from users, which constitutes a form of post-publication peer-review. Albeit a weak one in my opinion as the weakness of all such open depositories is the potential lack of interest of and reaction from the community. Incidentally, there is a $10 fee per submission for maintenance. Contrary to Peer Community in… the copyright is partly transferred to res3archers.one, which apparently prevents further publication in another journal.

Springer no more!

Just learned that, starting from tomorrow night, I will not have access to any of the Springer journals, as the negotiations between the consortium of French universities, research institutes, higher educations schools, and museums, failed. The commercial published refusing to stem the ever increasing fees, while happily taking in the fast increasing open access fees it pressures from authors, a unique example of triple taxation (researchers’ salaries, open access duties, and enormous non-negotiable subscription rates for the whole package of journals)… Following their German counterparts. Well, this is an opportunity for the boards of all these journals to withdraw and create the phantom version of their formal journal, evaluating and reviewing papers already available on arXiv! And I should definitely get my acts together, rise from my winter-is-coming lethargy, and launch PCI Comput Stat now!!!

Biometrika

After ten years of outstanding dedication to Biometrika, Anthony Davison is retiring as Editor of Biometrika on 31 December. Ten years! Running a top journal like Biometrika is a massive service to the statistics community, especially when considering the painstaking stage of literally editing each paper towards the stylistic requirements of the journal. For which we definitely should all be quite grateful to Anthony. And to the new Editor, Paul Fearnhead, for taking over. I will actually join the editorial board as assistant editor, along with Omiros Papaspiliopoulos, meaning we will share together the task of screening and allocating submissions. A bit daunting given the volume of submissions is roughly similar to the one I was handling for Series B ten years ago. And given the PCI Comput Stat experiment starting soon!