MODERATOR:
Anna Jester
Director of Sales & Marketing
eJournalPress
Washington, DC

SPEAKERS:
Tim Cross
Business Development Manager
Westchester Publishing Services
Lawrence, Kansas

Jennifer Lin
Director of Product Management
Crossref
San Francisco, California

Eric Pesanelli
Editorial Art Manager
American Physiological Society
Bethesda, Maryland

Jennifer Pesanelli
Deputy Executive Director for Operations
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
Bethesda, Maryland

Howard Ratner
Executive Director
CHORUS
New York, New York

Emma Shumeyko
Publishing, Managing Editor
American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics
Alexandria, Virginia

Heather Staines
Director, Partnerships
Hypothes.is
New York, New York

Emily Johnston
Business Development Director
Typefi
Oshkosh, Wisconsin

REPORTER:
Marissa Ayotte
Special Projects Manager
eJournalPress
Rockville, Maryland

The Knowledge Exchange provides attendees the opportunity to discuss a rotating selection of topics with speakers and fellow attendees in an intentionally interactive format. Two 25-minute rounds of discussion keep the conversation flowing. Following are summaries from 2 of the conversations from the 2018 CSE Annual Meeting.

DOIs for Peer Reviews

As of November 2017, Crossref started accepting submissions of DOIs for peer reviews.  Jennifer Lin explained that there was a need to attach peer reviews to the scholarly record and also that reviewers can get credit for those reviews. Reviews can now be included in the map of scholarly activities by connecting the DOI of the review to the DOI of the published article. Before this was made official, some reviews had been registered as a dataset and there was no consistency. The metadata schema for reviews is different from the schema for papers, so a new schema was created. Metadata includes items such as DOI, peer reviewer, title, date, license, competing interests, recommendation, and version of manuscript reviewed.

A question was raised about the fate of reviews of rejected manuscripts. As of this time they are not collected because there is no final published article to which they can be linked. Another question was asked regarding the possibility of earlier versions of those papers being made available so the concerns raised by reviewers can be seen in the original version. Crossref does not set policies about revealing reviewer names; they leave that to the journals. Some journals may elect to get a reviewer’s affirmative confirmation. Two options for reviewer confirmations could be to show reviews to authors only or to share them publicly.

Some suggest that peer review is not a piece of scholarship worthy of a DOI of its own, but others think this may even lead to additional research where the researcher can reference the DOI of a reviewer’s comments.

Preprints: Policies and Other Thoughts

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) was compelled by emphatic pressure from their author community to introduce a preprint option. Authors felt preprints were evolving, and FASEB would miss an opportunity if they did not move ahead and implement this alternative for authors. They had to consider many new concerns when creating their policy. For instance, they had to define what a preprint server is and whether personal websites and institutional repositories qualify. (They do not.) Education of the author community is key, especially when defining what is acceptable and what is not. Some criteria to consider is whether the server is maintained by a reputable organization and if DOIs are assigned.

Policies regarding preprints are changing and different for various publishers. Prior to submitting their paper to a preprint server, authors must do their research. Some journals consider a manuscript to have been “previously published” if placed on a preprint server and therefore not viable for consideration. Authors need to be certain their chosen journal allows them to post their paper on a preprint server, and also that the journal publisher considers a given preprint server a reputable and acceptable option. Some noted that the incentive for journals to publish a research paper is diminished if it is already “out there.” Retractions of preprints is an evolving concern. Some preprint servers, such as bioRxiv, will make note of retraction where authors also have the ability to remove a preprint from the website. There is not yet a clearly defined industry standard for retractions of preprints.

Additional information can be found at https://www.councilscienceeditors.org/events/previous-annual-meetings/cse-2018-annual-meeting/.