The convergence of digital libraries and the peer-review process

Abstract

Pre-print repositories have seen a significant increase in use over the past fifteen years across multiple research domains. Researchers are beginning to develop applications capable of using these repositories to assist the scientific community above and beyond the pure dissemination of information. The contributions set forth by this paper emphasize a deconstructed publication model in which the peer-review process is mediated by an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) peer-review service. This peer-review service uses a social-network algorithm to determine potential reviewers for a submitted manuscript and for weighting the influence of each participating reviewer's evaluations. This paper also suggests a set of peer-review specific metadata tags that can accompany a pre-print's existing metadata record. The combinations of these contributions provide a unique repository-centric peer-review model that fits within the widely deployed OAIPMH framework.