Open@RIT Position Paper: Federal Funding To Support Peer Review in Government-Funded Research

In the last several years, we’ve seen significant federal guidance emerge to support aspects of Open Science and national plans for Open Science, such as the French National Plan, outside of the US. The year 2023 was designated the “Year of Open Science” by the White House.

These efforts to support Open Science are partly driven by the number of challenges facing peer review, including the decreasing number of qualified reviewers. This, along with the massive growth in the area of for-profit, not-for-profit, pre-prints, and Open Access journals, has created a surplus in demand for reviewers. 

Open Peer Review, as part of the larger Open Science push, has been suggested as one possible avenue to expand the pool of reviewers and build greater efficiencies into the system. That concept lacks a significant body of evidence to establish acceptance in mainstream academia. And it doesn’t address the lack of incentives to engage as a reviewer.

In an ideal world, peer review would extend beyond journal article-style publications to include the review of data sets and source code. This is already required on work done directly by the federal government under the Information Quality Act and is in place for some journals such as the Journal of Open Source Software and the Journal of Statistical Software.

It is time for the federal government to support peer review directly as part of its efforts to move toward Open Science and greater reliability in the scientific enterprise.