The Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative

pro_lockThe Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative” is a grassroots attempt to promote open science by organising academics’ work as reviewers. All academics spend countless hours on peer review, a task which is unpaid, often pretty thankless, and yet employs their unique and hard-won skills as scholars. We do this, despite misgivings about the current state of scholarly publishing, because we know that good science depends on review and criticism.

Often this work is hampered because papers don’t disclose the data upon which the conclusions were drawn, or even share the materials used in the experiments. When journal articles only appeared in print and space was limited this was excusable. It no longer is.

The Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative is a pledge scholars can take, saying that they will not recommend for publication any article which does not make the data, materials and analysis code publicly available. You can read the exact details of the initiative here and you can sign it here.

The good of society, and for the good of science, everybody should be able to benefit from, and criticise, in all details, scientific work. Good science is open science.

Link: The Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative

One thought on “The Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative”

  1. This is an excellent collective action problem & it will be very interesting to see how it plays out.

    Perhaps a “Tycho Brahe” collective will become more famous than an individual Kepler.

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