Open Peer Review Module (OPRM). Software

Abstract

One important element missing from open access repositories is a quantitative assessment of the hosted research items that will facilitate the process of selecting the most relevant and distinguished content. Common currently available metrics, such as number of visits and downloads, do not reflect the quality of a research product, which can only be assessed directly by peers offering their expert opinion together with quantitative ratings based on specific criteria.

To address the aforementioned situation, the open peer review module, OPRM, can be installed to existing Dspace institutional or other repositories and offered as an overlay service. Digital research works hosted in these repositories could then be evaluated by an unlimited number of peers that would offer not only a qualitative assessment in the form of text, but also quantitative measures that will be used to build the work’s reputation. Importantly, this evaluation system will be open and transparent. By open we mean that the full text of the peer reviews will be publicly available along with the original research work. By transparent we mean that the identity of the reviewers will be disclosed to the authors and to the public. In our model, openness and transparency are two elemental aspects we consider necessary to address the issue of biased or non-expert opinions, which is inherent in the anonymous peer review model, characterized by the unaccountability of reviewers.

Important to notice, OPRM includes a reviewer reputation system based on the assessment of reviews themselves by other peer reviewers. This allows a sophisticated scaling of the importance of each review on the overall assessment of a research work, based on the reputation of the reviewer