PRISM & Peer Review Week: building trust in OA books through transparency of peer review procedures

Silke Davison

Mon 25 Sep 2023

Read this article at hypothèses.org

What comes to your mind when you hear the words peer review? Perhaps it’s a group of academics evaluating manuscripts and papers, or maybe it’s a specific type of peer review, like open, double-anonymised, or collaborative. Some of you might even think of DOAB’s Peer Review Information Service for Monographs, or PRISM, as we like to call it.  

If you’ve never heard of PRISM or need a little reminder, for this year’s Peer Review Week (25-29 September), we at DOAB thought we’d tell you (especially you publishers out there) all about it! 

So, what exactly is PRISM? Good question! PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue through DOAB. And the best part about it? It’s completely free!  

How does it work? you may ask. Well, first and foremost, participating publishers send us their peer review information. As well as displaying each publisher’s peer review processes, we also show which process applies to which individual publication from that publisher, for complete transparency. 

PRISM is recognisable through the handy logo visible next to a publisher or the title of a publication (all you need to do is click the logo to display more information). You can also use the search query ‘peerreview.id:*’ to find all DOAB publications with linked PRISM records (of which there are over 5,200). Last but certainly not least, the PRISM API, which includes peer review metadata, allows application developers to seamlessly incorporate peer review information into other applications. 

PRISM benefits the academic publishing community by: 

  • giving librarians confidence in recommending open access publications to their patrons 
  • allowing funders and users to see key details about quality control processes of open access books, and 
  • providing publishers with the opportunity to showcase their best practices. 

PRISM has been around for about a year now, and we’d love for more publishers to join us as we grow and expand this free service. We’re even developing a widget for publishers to use on their websites! You can participate following these simple steps: 

  1. Check you’re a member of DOAB and join us if you’re not 
  1. Agree to the T&Cs of PRISM
  1. Provide DOAB with your peer review process(es) as described in our documentation for publishers
  1. Log in to DOAB and create a PRISM peer review submission. When it’s accepted, your submission becomes a record. If it’s rejected, the information is deleted
  1.  Attach your PRISM record to the applicable publication(s).

Don’t forget that the OAPEN Library’s participating publishers’ peer review policies are also listed on OAPEN’s website for anyone to access.  

Please reach out to us with any questions, comments, feedback, or to participate in the PRISM service at info@oapen.org.