Academic publisher Taylor & Francis has released the sixth in a series of press releases on the themes and findings of the Open Access (OA) Survey. In this survey, Taylor & Francis investigated authors' preferred methods of peer review suitable for their research.
Taylor & Francis / Routledge journals, including those that are part of the Open programme, reportedly benefit from editor-led rigorous peer review and wanted to understand the value and importance of this service to its author base.
Respondents were asked about the kind of peer review they find the most suitable for their research when publishing an OA article. Findings from the survey show that 45 percent of all respondents would 'always' value a 'rigorous assessment of the merit and novelty of their article with constructive comments for its improvement'. Adding those who would 'often' prefer this more traditional style of peer review takes this figure up to 78 percent.
Moving down the scale of rigour, to peer review that 'reviews the technical soundness of my research without any judgement on its novelty or interest', there is a huge fall in support; only 11 percent of authors would 'always' find this suitable for their OA articles. Similarly the number of supporters for an 'accelerated peer review [process] with fewer rounds of revision' shrinks, with only 9 percent of respondents 'always' accepting this method. And lastly, only 7 percent of respondents would 'always' find 'post-publication peer review after a basic check by invited reviewers' appropriate. In fact, more than a quarter of authors would 'never' value 'post-publication peer review'; contrastingly, the number of those who answered 'never' to traditional peer review was too small to plot on the chart.
Across all subjects and regions, the majority of authors felt that rigorous peer review would be the most suitable refereeing style for the bulk of their OA research papers (selecting 'always' or 'often'). Authors from Library and Information Science seem least wedded to the traditional style of peer review but even here 72 percent of authors said they would 'always' or 'often' find this rigorous peer review suitable for their OA articles.
Peer review in the style of PLoS One, which 'reviews the technical soundness of my research without any judgement on its novelty or interest', is the second most popular type of review for most subject areas, finding the largest level of support from Library and Information Scientists (50 percent choosing 'always' or 'often').
'Accelerated peer review [process] with fewer rounds of revision in (the style of eLIfe)' was the second most popular form of peer review in seven subject areas, most notably Business and Economics where 41percent of respondents chose 'always' or 'often' for this option. 'Post-publication peer review' in the style of f1000 Research found most favour from authors in Chemistry and Materials Science, where it saw a similar level of support as the other two types of alternative peer review models.
Authors from Asia, the Middle East and Africa were slightly more supportive of all the alternative forms of peer review but only those from the Middle East and Asia showed a corresponding decrease in support for rigorous peer review. However, this still came out as the most popular type of review in both of these regions.
