The scope of open peer review in the scholarly publishing ecosystem

Abstract

This study explores the selective corpus of existing literature on Open Peer Review (OPR) to understand and map the extent of adoption of OPR in the scholarly communication, the reflection of different aspects of human emotion embedded in the open peer review reports and authors’ response as well, the influence of OPR reports on citation status of articles, and application of Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and similar technologies in improving the operational viability as well as acceptability of OPR among the scholarly community. The study finds the emergence of various OPR adoption policies and levels of adoption together with emerging models of scientific publishing. Clearly, there is a lack of uniform OPR adoption policy. It also highlights the association of different sets of human emotional traits with OPR reports. The experimentation with the possibility of treating preprint servers and open access repositories as a manuscript marketplace for the eventual selection of articles for open peer review and journal publication is noticed. More research on the influence of human behavioural aspects on OPR practice and the application of emergent technologies in OPR would be required before finally settling down on a stable roadmap for OPR.