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Problems with open participation in peer review

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Abstract

In this letter, we study an open participation model of peer review in which potential reviewers choose whether to review a manuscript, at a cost, without a formal invitation. The outcome is a compromise among the reviewers’ recommendations. Here we show that the equilibrium number of reviewers in the public peer review is small, their recommendations are extreme, and the outcome is likely to be random when the compromise is the median of the reviewers’ recommendations.

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by Spanish Board for Science, Technology, and Innovation (Grant No. TIN2013-41585-P).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación e I. A., CITIC-UGR, Universidad de Granada, 18071, Granada, Spain

    J. A. García, Rosa Rodriguez-Sánchez & J. Fdez-Valdivia

Authors
  1. J. A. García
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  2. Rosa Rodriguez-Sánchez
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  3. J. Fdez-Valdivia
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Correspondence to J. A. García.

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García, J.A., Rodriguez-Sánchez, R. & Fdez-Valdivia, J. Problems with open participation in peer review. Scientometrics 112, 1881–1885 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2445-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2445-4

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