An Open Peer Review Module for Open Access Repositories

Abstract

We present the first open peer review module for open access repositories. The module, designed in this first stage for integration with DSpace repositories, enables any scholar to offer a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of any research object hosted in a compliant repository. Weighted reputation metrics are calculated for individual articles, reviews, authors and reviewers. An advanced search function allows repository users to filter or sort research objects based on their reputation or the number of positive reviews. The integration of peer review in repositories promotes open scholarship by enabling a direct and transparent collaboration between authors and reviewers, and produces novel metrics directly reflecting the perceived quality of a research work by expert peers, contrary to current available metrics that only indirectly account for quality through usage statistics. The open peer review module has already been installed in two major Spanish repositories (DIGITAL.CSIC, e-IEO) with promising initial results.