Peerage of Science

Peerage of Science was a Finnish scientific peer-review and publishing service founded in Jyväskylä in 2011 by ecologists Janne Kotiaho, Mikko Mönkkönen, and Janne-Tuomas Seppänen. It was created in response to perceived weaknesses in conventional academic peer review, including repeated reviewing of the same manuscript as it moved between journals, limited transparency around referee performance, difficulty recruiting qualified reviewers, and the loss of useful reviews when a journal rejected a submission. The service initially concentrated on ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation biology, then broadened its intended scientific scope within roughly two years. Its central concept was a unified reviewing process. Rather than requiring authors to obtain a fresh set of reviews for every journal in a sequence, Peerage of Science allowed participating journals to access a common review process. Under its Select arrangement, multiple journals could consider a manuscript concurrently and make publication offers independently. Under its Connect arrangement, journals could access the review process when an author elected to submit or connect the manuscript to them. Authors retained the ability to accept or decline offers, while reviews could remain useful across multiple journal decisions. The platform also experimented with several mechanisms intended to improve review quality and accountability. Reviewers could choose manuscripts they wished to assess instead of being selected solely by an editor. Reviewing was generally non-anonymous, and participants could evaluate the quality of other reviewers' reports through a separate peer-review-of-peer-review stage. Reviewers could publish their assessments as so-called Peerage Essays and build a reputation measure known as a referee factor. The system also sought to balance participation by limiting manuscript submissions when a user's reviewing activity was not proportionate to the number of manuscripts submitted. Authors could set deadlines for the submission of reviews, the evaluation of those reviews, revised manuscripts, and final assessments. The platform applied these deadlines automatically. It also applied conflict-of-interest restrictions: potential reviewers from the same institution as an author, or those who had co-authored with an author within the previous three years, were excluded. Authors and other participants could recommend potential reviewers, while academics selected work according to their interests and availability. Peerage of Science was free to scientists and did not pay participating reviewers. Its business model instead depended on payments from publishers and journal organizations using the service. Reported customers or contracting publishers included the Society for Conservation Biology and major scholarly publishing groups such as Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, BioMed Central, Elsevier, and Brill. The service received external recognition, winning the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers' 2012 Award for Publishing Innovation and a 2013 recognition award from Communications Professionals of Finnish Universities. Despite this patronage and the novelty of its model, Peerage of Science did not build a sufficiently large market. The service reportedly received only 102 manuscript submissions in 2017, and approximately 60 percent of those submissions received at least one publishing offer. It subsequently went out of business, apparently soon after 2017. The venture is therefore best understood as a defunct scholarly-communication service whose principal legacy lies in its attempt to make peer review reusable across journals, more open to participant choice, and more explicitly accountable through reviewer evaluation.

Peerage of Science emerged in Finland in 2011 as an effort to redesign the relationship between manuscript authors, peer reviewers, and scholarly journals. Its founders were scientists Janne Kotiaho, Mikko Mönkkönen, and Janne-Tuomas Seppänen, and the venture was based in Jyväskylä. The initial target communities were ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation biology, fields in which the founders could draw on practical knowledge of journal review and publication. Within approximately two years, the service sought to extend its model to a wider range of scientific disciplines. The platform was built around the idea that peer review should be reusable rather than discarded whenever a manuscript was rejected by one journal. Its unified reviewing process enabled participating journals to consider a common set of reviews. In the Select model, journals could access the process concurrently and make offers to authors as they saw fit. In the Connect model, a journal could participate when an author chose to connect the manuscript to it. Authors maintained control over whether to accept offers, while the same review reports could inform decisions at more than one journal. Peerage of Science also attempted to change who controlled the review process and how reviewers were recognized. Reviewers could choose manuscripts to assess instead of waiting for an editor to invite them. Authors and other users could suggest reviewers, although institutional and recent co-authorship conflicts triggered automatic exclusion. The service favored open engagement rather than relying exclusively on anonymous reports. Reviewers could be evaluated by other participants, and the quality of those evaluations contributed to a reviewer profile and a referee factor. Participants could also publish reviews as Peerage Essays, creating a possible scholarly record for reviewing work that normally remains private. The system introduced a reciprocal quality-control stage in which users judged the accuracy and usefulness of peer reviews. Authors could specify separate deadlines for the initial reviews, review-of-review, manuscript revision, and final evaluation, with the platform enforcing those dates. A participation-balancing rule linked the ability to submit manuscripts to the number of reviews performed, an attempt to reduce free-riding and encourage users to contribute to the reviewing community. The platform was free for scientists, did not remunerate reviewers, and instead charged publishers and participating journal organizations. The model attracted support from a number of scholarly publishing and learned-society customers. Reported participants or customers included the Society for Conservation Biology, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, BioMed Central, Elsevier, and Brill. Peerage of Science also received recognition for innovation: it won the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers' Award for Publishing Innovation in 2012 and a recognition award from Communications Professionals of Finnish Universities in 2013. The service nevertheless faced the difficult economics of building a two-sided academic marketplace. Its success depended on attracting enough authors, reviewers, and journals simultaneously. The reported 2017 submission count was only 102, and roughly 60 percent of submissions received at least one publishing offer. These figures indicated that the platform had not achieved the scale needed to establish a durable market position despite publisher patronage and positive industry recognition. Peerage of Science went out of business soon afterward. Its history represents an early attempt to apply portability, user choice, reviewer reputation, and partial openness to scholarly peer review, but also illustrates the challenges faced by specialist infrastructure ventures in academic publishing.

• 2017

  Records limited submission volume

  [1]Peerage of Scienceen.wikipedia.org

  The service receives 102 submissions, and approximately 60 percent receive at least one publishing offer.

• 2013

  Receives Finnish university communications recognition

  [1]Peerage of Scienceen.wikipedia.org

  Communications Professionals of Finnish Universities gives Peerage of Science a recognition award.

• 2012

  Receives the ALPSP Award for Publishing Innovation

  [1]Peerage of Scienceen.wikipedia.org

  The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers recognizes the service's attempt to innovate in scholarly publishing.

• 2011

  Peerage of Science is founded in Jyväskylä

  [1]Peerage of Scienceen.wikipedia.org

  Janne Kotiaho, Mikko Mönkkönen, and Janne-Tuomas Seppänen establish the Finnish peer-review service.

• Operations end

  [1]Peerage of Scienceen.wikipedia.org

  Peerage of Science goes out of business soon after the reported 2017 activity period.

A collaborative and publisher-funded alternative to conventional journal-by-journal peer review, emphasizing review portability, reviewer choice, open engagement, deadline control, and evaluation of review quality.

• Concurrent journal consideration

  Select

  The Select arrangement gave participating journals concurrent access to the Peerage of Science review process. Editors could make publication offers at different points, while authors could choose whether to accept or decline them. The model was intended to prevent reviews from being discarded when a manuscript was rejected by one journal.

• Journal connection workflow

  Connect

  Connect allowed a participating journal to access a manuscript's review process when the author elected to submit or connect the work to that journal. It preserved the service's central idea that a review could be used across journal consideration rather than repeated from the beginning.

• Published peer-review commentary

  Peerage Essays

  Peerage Essays were a mechanism through which reviewers could publish their reviews or review-related assessments. The feature was designed to give reviewing greater visibility and to create a scholarly record for work that is normally performed anonymously and remains inaccessible after publication decisions.

• Reviewer reputation metric

  Referee factor

  The referee factor was a reputation-oriented measure associated with the quality of a participant's peer reviewing. It formed part of the platform's broader attempt to make reviewer performance visible and to reward careful reviewing through profile-based recognition rather than direct payment.

• 2011

  Build a unified, review-portable peer-review systemStrategy

  Background

  The founders sought to address repeated reviewing, reviewer shortages, limited transparency, and the loss of useful reviews when manuscripts moved between journals.

  Action taken

  Peerage of Science created a shared workflow in which participating journals could use the same review process and authors could choose among publishing offers.

  Aftermath

  The model attracted publisher and learned-society customers but did not achieve sufficient submission volume to remain commercially sustainable.

  Source

• Expand beyond the original biological-science disciplinesStrategy

  Background

  The service initially focused on ecology, evolutionary biology, and conservation biology.

  Action taken

  Within approximately two years, Peerage of Science broadened its intended scope to additional areas of science.

  Aftermath

  The expansion did not produce a sufficiently broad market base, and the service later ceased operations.

  Source

1. 1Peerage of Scienceen.wikipedia.org
2. 2Peerage of Science official websitepeerageofscience.org