Peer reviewing in the contemporary academic communications

Abstract

The paper is devoted to substantiating the requirements that make sense to present to the journal articles manuscripts’ peer reviews in order to reduce the reviewers’ efforts without reducing the reviews quality. For this, the role of peer review in scientific communication is characterized, and the changes that have occurred in scientific communication over the past two decades are analyzed, including the emergence of open access journals and its consequences: mega-journals and predatory journals. An assessment of the new model of peer review in mega-journals is given, which reduces the efforts of reviewers, but also reduces the level of trust in the articles published in them. The twofold function of peer reviewing is analyzed: social, which resolves the problem to support the scientific knowledge growth, and facilitates the scientists’ orientation in journal publications, and private, which increases the publishers’ competitive advantages in the scientific publications market. It is proposed to separate these functions, leaving traditionally voluntary reviews only for social function, and transferring private to the category of fee-based services: the journal’s editor(publisher) can order to reviewer same recommendation for author on paper’s improving. A description of the new requirements for peer reviews is given, in which only the scientific nature of the article, the author’s professional competence, and the novelty of the research results obtained should be analyzed.