Customise Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorised as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyse the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customised advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyse the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Reimagining peer-review

By dwhly | 8 August, 2012

Late last year I was approached by Hilmar Lapp at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center to keynote their iEvoBio conference in Ottawa this July, immediately following the historic Evolution 2012 conference also in Ottawa this year – the “First Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology.”

I was impressed by the Open Source Commitment that captures the central ethos of their event:

iEvoBio and its sponsors are dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and reuse within the research community.

Hilmar asked me to speak about how peer-review is changing, and what the potential is for it moving forward.  I readily accepted.

I gave a talk called “Reimagining peer-review,” the video of which is available below. My slides (with notes that include further detail and citations) are available here.

Essentially, the talk goes something like this:

While (quite sophisticated) elements of peer-review were first used in the written form of the Talmud as annotated by rabbis over a thousand years ago, the modern form of peer-review we associate with academic journals is something that has only been practiced since the 18th century, and in widespread use since the end of WWII.

The need for peer-review and the infrastructure to enable peer-review have both been driven by changes in distribution technology (such as the printing press, the carbon copy, the Xerox machine, and now the Internet).

As we look forward, the Internet clearly gives us the potential to reimagine how collaboration and distributed review can be facilitated not only in academic, but more broadly in civic and public domains – extending, improving and applying the lessons that scholars have used towards the information we all rely on in our everyday lives.

I gave our first public glimpse at the hypothes.is prototype which was well received (visible at the end of the video).

I was so impressed by the community of evolutionary biologists that were present in Ottawa. Nearly every talk dealt not only with the complexities of this extraordinary field, but also software systems that the presenter had invariably developed herself in order to further extend her research. This group is a perfect match for us as we begin looking to early communities to give us early feedback on how an open and distributed peer-review model can best be designed and be effective.

Share this article