Submitting your manuscript for open validation

  1. Home
  2. Submitting your manuscript for open validation

Opening up the publication process is still in its experimental phase, and may help avoid selection biases and encourage more ethical and transparent publication.

Peer validation is one of the pillars of scientific publishing, guaranteeing its quality. Practices vary from one discipline to the next (open, single-blind, double-blind, etc.). Often unconscious biases in traditional processes have led open publication platforms and projects to experiment with several types of open practice:

  • opening production (reports and comments), with reviewers remaining anonymous

  • knowing the names of reviewers

  • broadening comments to the entire scientific community (in a journal or based on a preprint)

These initiatives emanate both from individual activists and from major publishers (Nature, Elsevier). There have been a particularly large number in the medical sciences, but they have also reached the social sciences, for example. In the HASS, OpenEdition has conducted some trials.

Certain reviewers also wish to promote a time-consuming and largely unrecognised activity by publishing their reviews on dedicated platforms. This practice raises two issues: the capture of data by private platforms, and the risk of this having a long-term impact on career progression.