New Toolkits on the Block: Peer Review Alternatives in Scholarly Communication

Peer review continues to play a central role in scholarly communication processes, however, over the last decade the concept has branched out in terms of methods, platforms and stakeholders involved. The paper demonstrates how alternative peer review tools and methods are instrumental in further shaping the communication of scholarly results towards Open Science. The analysis is based on the examination of various review methods (peer commentary, post-publication peer review, decoupled review, portable or cascading review) and review tools and services (publishing platforms, repository-based, and independent reviews). Besides the differences in operation and functionality, these new workflows and services combine common features of network-based solutions and collaborative research applications with varying degrees of openness (e.g. regarding participation, identities and/or reports). They, therefore, represent good examples of Open Science, in terms of transparency and networking among researchers.