Peer review: still king in the digital age

ABSTRACT
The article presents one of the main fi ndings of an international study of 4,000 academic researchers that examined how trustworthiness is determined in the digital environment when it comes to scholarly reading, citing, and publishing. The study shows that peer review is still the most trustworthy characteristic of all. There is, though, a common perception that open access journals are not peer reviewed or do not have proper peer-review systems. Researchers appear to have moved inexorably from a print-based system to a digital system, but it has not signifi cantly changed the way they decide what to trust. They do not trust social media. Only a minority – although signifi cantly mostly young and early career researchers – thought that social media are anything other than more appropriate to personal interactions and peripheral to their professional/academic lives. There are other signifi cant differences, according to the age of the researcher. Thus, in regard to choosing an outlet for publication of their work, young researchers are much less concerned with the fact that it is peer reviewed.
Authors: David Nicholas; Anthony Watkinson; Hamit R. Jamali; Eti Herman; Carol Tenopir; Rachel Volentine; Suzie Allard; Kenneth Levine
URL: http://bit.ly/1zZb2Fo