PRISM: Peer Review Information Service for Monographs

Welcome to PRISM – Peer Review Information Service for Monographs. PRISM is a service provided by DOAB as part of the OPERAS service catalogue.

DOAB (including PRISM) is overseen by a Scientific Committee which validates and reviews requirements, and acts as a Board of Appeal for complaints from publishers.

Like DOAB, publishers can participate in PRISM for free. PRISM information is freely and easily identifiable on DOAB’s website next to the publisher name or indexed work.

What are the benefits of PRISM?

PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue. At the publisher level, all their peer review processes are visible (as they may have more than one process in use across all their series and titles). At the level of an individual publication, the peer review process applied to that work is displayed.

PRISM’s goal is to provide transparency about the peer review process(es) that apply to their works. This helps build trust in open access academic book publishing.

To enable application integration, we have made a PRISM API available – learn more about the PRISM API.

How can PRISM help me?

If you’re a publisher, PRISM helps you display the peer review process that has been applied to works in your collection. This helps you showcase how you apply best practices in peer review. A PRISM widget has been developed which will allow publishers to display PRISM information about their works on their website.

If you’re a librarian, PRISM allows you to see the quality control process that applies to a given work. This will give you confidence in recommending the work as a reliable source to your researchers and students.

If you’re a funder, PRISM gives you more detailed information about the quality assurance process of the research outputs you’ve funded.

If you’re a researcher, student, or a general reader, PRISM allows you to see the quality control process that applies to a given work. This will give you more information about the publisher.

How can I see PRISM in action?

There are four ways to see PRISM at work:

  1. On the DOAB site, you will see a PRISM logo next to a publisher. Click on the PRISM logo to see the details of the publisher’s peer review process(es). You may see more than one process displayed, as some publishers apply different processes to different series or works.

PRISM - On the DOAB site, you will see a PRISM logo next to a publisher.png

  1. On the DOAB site, you will see a PRISM logo next to a work. Click on the PRISM logo to see the detail of the peer review process that has been applied to the work.

PRISM - On the DOAB site, you will see a PRISM logo next to a work.png

  1. See all the works in DOAB that have PRISM information using this query

PRISM - See all the works in PRISM - DOAB that have PRISM information using this query.png

  1. PRISM peer review metadata is also available through the DOAB API which is freely distributed and incorporated into library search tools worldwide.

Can I display PRISM information on my own website?

If you want to display PRISM information on your own website, you can deploy the PRISM widget. The documentation can be found here: https://github.com/trilobiet/prism-widget.

What are the PRISM terms?

Publishers can request to be included in PRISM if they agree to the terms and conditions of the service.

Publishers must provide correct information and may be suspended from using PRISM if there is evidence that the information they provided is incorrect. Such cases may be referred to the Scientific Committee, which acts as a Board of Appeal. Suspended publishers may be required to reapply for the service and their inclusion may be revoked. DOAB reserves the right to announce such measures through its media channels.

I’m a publisher - what do I need to do to participate in PRISM?

  1. Prepare: you will need to provide DOAB with details of your peer review process(es), so it’s important to spend time with colleagues (especially those on editorial boards) to collect this information and ensure it reflects the range of practices across your publications before moving on to the next steps. Learn more about how to prepare for PRISM in the DOAB publishers’ guide

  2. You need to be a member of DOAB. Joining DOAB is open to all academic publishers who meet our requirements of applying a peer review process to their academic books, and making their books available under an open access licence.

  3. You log in to DOAB and create a PRISM peer review submission with information about your peer review process – the information you collected at step 1. If you have more than one process, you will repeat this step for each one.

  4. Your PRISM peer review submission is checked by the DOAB administrator. Any disputes are referred to the DOAB Scientific Committee. When your submission is accepted, it becomes a PRISM record. If your submission is not approved, the information is deleted.

  5. You can now attach your PRISM record to each of your works in DOAB. You may describe more than one peer review process, but you may only attach one process description to each work.

  6. Your peer review process information is now available in several ways - see “How can I see PRISM in action?” above.