2018 Charleston Library Conference

This session will feature a panel of scholarly publishers and research librarians reporting on recent efforts to increase the degree of transparency in the standards and practices of peer review used by scholarly publishers—and the communication of these practices to readers through the use of effective signaling systems (patterned on Creative Commons) and the development of metadata standards. Inspired by the assertion of the “Principles of Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing”—also known as the “Tempe Principles”— that “the system of scholarly publication must continue to include processes for evaluating the quality of scholarly work[,] and every publication should provide the reader with information about the evaluation the work has undergone,” participants in this panel have taken part in an ongoing project, funded by the Open Societies Foundation and supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to propose standard definitions of various kinds of peer review and a system of signaling to readers and cataloguers just how a given work has been reviewed. At present, many cataloguing systems offer patrons a peer review "filter," which often yields misleading results -- being typically based on journal titles. In a moment when scholarly authority is being challenged, making clear the warrants for the claim scholarly publishers make for the quality of what they publish is in the interests of all stakeholders in the scholarly communication ecosystem.