Opening Review in LIS Journals: A Status Report

INTRODUCTION Peer-review practices in scholarly publishing are changing. Digital publishing mechanisms allow for open peer review, a peer review process that discloses author and reviewer identities to one another. This model of peer review is increasingly implemented in scholarly publishing. In science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines, open peer review is implemented in journal publishing processes, and, in the humanities and social sciences, it is often coupled with new scholarship practices, such as the digital humanities. This article reports findings from an exploratory study on peer-review and publishing practices in Library and Information Science (LIS), focusing on LIS’s relationships with open peer review. METHODS Editors of LIS journals were surveyed regarding journal peer review and publishing practices. RESULTS This article reports the general “pulse” of attitudes and conversations regarding open peer review and discusses its challenges in LIS. Results show an ideological split between traditionally-published journals and open access and association-affiliated journals. Open access and association-affiliated journal editors are more likely to consider investigating open peer review. DISCUSSION The LIS community of journal editors, authors, reviewers, and readers need to discuss open peer review as well as experiment with it. Experiments with open peer review in scholarly LIS publishing will inform our praxis as librarians.


INTRODUCTION
The publication of research and writing in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) has the potential to be central in today's world of experimental publishing and review practices. With online publishing, journals are no longer limited by page constraints and the cost of paper printing. Digital publication allows for enhancement of articles with supplemental files, social media widgets, and online discussion platforms. This potential to enhance and transform the dissemination of scholarly work is both exciting and overwhelming. Current publishing technologies-such as CrossRef 's CrossMark® and plugins from companies such as Altmetric-streamline publication processes, offer authority and version control, and track a work's impact using alternative measures such as social media mentions and citations in blog posts, policy documents, media coverage, and more. This technological flexibility also enables open access (OA) publication and creates the space to experiment with alternative review processes.
As more LIS publications become OA, regardless of whether articles are published Libre OA (the removal of price and usage barriers) or Gratis OA (the removal of price barriers) (Suber, 2008), LIS publishing is moving toward an "opening up" of scholarship. This is evidenced by the move of LIS publications from subscription-based to OA publishing models, such as with College & Research Libraries' change to OA status in 2011 (Branin, 2011). Relatedly, a small but growing movement in scholarly publishing seeks to adopt more transparent peer review processes. One prevalent approach, frequently called open review or open peer review (OPR), refers to a transformation of the double-blind (masking both author and referee identities) or single-blind (masking referee identities to authors, but author identities are known by referees) peer-review processes most frequently employed by journals. In their most basic form, implementations of OPR provide disclosure of author and reviewer identities to one another, rather than masking them. Implemented in different ways, OPR is a growing experiment in journal publishing and scholarly communities across the disciplines.
In this article I offer a brief literature review exploring OPR and publishing in LIS. Then I discuss challenges that OPR presents to the LIS publishing community, point to areas for further research, and discuss the need for LIS publishing to experiment with OPR. In essence, I portray a snapshot of the OPR landscape in LIS journal publishing.

What is Open Peer Review?
Although not universally defined or implemented, OPR seeks to move away from doubleblind or blind review. It frequently allows for authors and referees to engage in attributed discourse (Ford, 2013a). Sometimes OPR includes public commentary on published or pre-publication articles, and various implementations even make referee and author comments publicly available. In a 2010 special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Katherine Rowe tackled an experiment with open review. It invited reviewers and authors to participate in a process allowing open peer expert commentary on submitted articles (Fitzpatrick & Rowe, 2010).
Further shaping open review practices is the Mellon Foundation white paper that outlines practices for this experimental review paradigm (Fitzpatrick & Santo, 2012). One of the white paper's main points is that "[t]he form and function of open review practices, like any peer review process, should be dictated by community goals and needs, which should in turn determine the technologies employed" (p. 4). Open review, the authors argue, cannot and should not be universally implemented across the entirety of scholarly publishing. Rather, the practice needs to have "structured flexibility" for scholarly communities to engage in conversations about its implementation and purpose and to allow for its development, change, and evolution over time (p. 4).
OPR has seen a process-driven and systemic implementation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields where it is layered over research outputs from traditional bench, clinical, and quantitative sciences. On the other hand, in the humanities and social sciences, open review is more broadly coupled with emerging forms of scholarly communication trends, specifically with the advent of the digital humanities. Notably, too, there is a long history of arguments expressing dissatisfaction with double-blind and blind peer review processes in STEM fields. This dissatisfaction points to the inefficacy of the 'blind' system, when it is easy to identify authors based on citations and scope of work (Jefferson T, Alderson P, Wager E, & Davidoff F, 2002;Jones, 2007), and the phenomenon of 'abusive' and unprofessional reviewer comments (Boldt, 2011;Pöschl, 2004Pöschl, , 2012. Taken together, the empiricism of STEM research as well as a history of dissatisfaction with traditional peer review processes, lends itself to utilizing new structured peer-review processes. In STEM, pre-print servers such as arXiv serve as unofficial open-review mechanisms that can easily be formalized into open peer-review publication platforms (Boldt, 2011). One journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, has used a formal OPR process since 2001-longer than any other journal publication (Pöschl, 2004). Additionally, OA acceptance and use in STEM fields is growing, and many new publications allow for OPR processes. This growth may be due to the availability of grant funding to pay article processing charges (APCs), the existence of federal policies requiring public access to publicly funded research, and/or the need for STEM researchers to disclose research funding sources. Although open review and OA are not synonymous and do not need to be concurrently implemented, the adoption of OA in STEM fields has led to a greater number of visible OPR implementations in STEM journals. It is harder to determine adoption in humanities and social sciences, since frequently these fields couple OPR with other digital scholarship changes, such as in the digital humanities.
There also exist many perceived challenges to OPR. Perhaps the most substantive of those challenges call attention to the roles of referees, editors, and publishers in this new review paradigm (Janowicz & Hitzler, 2012;Nentwich, 2005). "Will public comments be deemed authoritative?" and "What role does an editor have in OPR?" are a few questions exemplifying this challenge. Other questions include, "Will referees or authors participate in open review?" and "What guidelines do we need to implement to use technologies enabling open review?" The need to configure publishing platforms to support OPR introduces intricacies for developing OPR processes (Fitzpatrick & Rowe, 2010;Sumner & Shum, 1996). Too, there remains the question of how scholarly communities will perceive journals that use OPR. Will communities view OPR as less authoritative and valid? If conversations regarding OPR follow in the same vein as those regarding OA, we can expect similar challenges in how individuals and communities perceive it.
Although OPR implementations are increasing in number, as exemplified by the advent of megajournals such as F1000Research, PeerJ, and Collabra, OPR is still not widely accepted. Discourse with respect to opening peer-review practices continues.

Publishing in LIS
There are several themes in the literature relating to publishing and LIS. Professional development support and encouragement for librarians to pursue writing and publication is one such theme. Smigielski, Laning, and Daniels (2014) found that "…funding, protected time, and mentoring" were the most utilized forms of professional development support for librarians at Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions, with journal clubs being the least utilized (p. 264, Smigielski, Laning, & Daniels). Other authors have encouraged librarians to pursue writing and publication and offered advice in doing so-from forming writing groups (Sullivan, Leong, Yee, Giddens, & Phillips, 2013) to examining one's own behaviors and developing a writing practice that complements them (Ford, 2013b), and to demystifying writing and publication practices (Lamothe, 2012). It should also be noted that scholarly publishing in LIS is dominated by academics, academic librarians, and faculty members at LIS schools. Public librarians, on the other hand, are part of what Hugh Rundle calls a "read-only culture," where librarians consume articles, but do not participate in producing scholarly research articles (Rundle, 2013).
As in other academic disciplines, there is a wide range of publishing in LIS. In its 2014 Information Science & Library Science category, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) lists 46 publications, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists 158 journals in its Bibliography, Information Science, and Library Science category. Moreover, professional associations such as the American Library Association ( Librarians are practitioners as well as scholars. As such, libraries have developed programs and services that support writing and publishing for scholars from all fields. Librarians and libraries serve to educate their communities about OA publishing, and some libraries support authors with OA funds, providing authors the financial means to pay article processing charges (APCs). Libraries also act as publishers, hosting scholarly journals on digital publishing platforms like Ubiquity Press, which presently hosts the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. The primary difference between libraries and other publishers is that library publishing is supported overall by library budgets, rather than by advertising and subscription revenue, or even APCs (Skinner, Lippincott, Speer, & Walters, 2014, para. 5). Driven partially by researchers' frustration with economic models for scholarly publishing-including the OA publishing model that relies on sometimes unsustainable APCs-Martin Eve proposed the formation of Research Output Teams, a collaboration between libraries and publishers (Eve, 2012). While Eve's model has yet to have widespread adoption, libraries are taking seriously their role as publishers. Moreover, with the recent push for college affordability, libraries are advocating for, incentivizing the creation of, and publishing open educational resources (Allen, Bell, & Billings, 2014).
Despite libraries' and librarians' roles in scholarly publishing, there is astonishingly little literature discussing OPR in LIS-either as library publisher of academic journals, or in LIS publications. One article discusses open peer review practices and unpacks open review models at two journals: In the Library with the Lead Pipe and Code4Lib Journal (Ford & Bean, 2012). Why the lack of conversation? Just where is the LIS community in regards to its attitudes about and needs for OPR? The rest of this article begins to answer these questions.

METHODOLOGY
In summer of 2014, I surveyed LIS journal editors in order to understand the state of OPR in LIS publishing. The survey posed questions regarding current publishing and review practices and inquired about changes journals may have made to publication and review processes. The survey instrument is included as an appendix to this article.
Using lists of English-language peer-reviewed LIS publications from the DOAJ and Journal Citation Reports, I identified LIS publications and their editors for both OA and non-OA journals. After compiling editor contact information, I solicited survey participation of 253 editors via email. I received 53 responses, 42 of which were complete-a response rate of 20%. It was not possible to determine whether the low response rate was a result of unmonitored email, spam filters, survey fatigue, or email and work backlogs. The pervasive use of web contact forms that do not allow direct contact with journal editors on publisher sites also complicated survey outreach. Although I attempted to find valid email addresses for editors, there remained 15 unresolved email bounce backs after attempts to reconcile contact information. Finally, it should be noted that the survey instrument (see Appendix) did not offer respondents a definition of OPR, which may have resulted in ambiguity of some respondents' comments. Despite these challenges, data gathered still allows for an exploration of OPR in LIS publishing and begins a conversation about publishing and review practices in the discipline.

Journal Demographics
Because this survey excluded non-English language journals, the majority of those represented are published in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Represented journals cover a variety of topics in LIS, with the majority representing academic libraries, and a small minority in the area of Information Science & Theory. None of the journals publish on public library-related topics (Table 1).
About half of the responding journals are published by traditional publishers, 1 and onethird of journals represented are affiliated with professional organizations. Only 4.5% of responding LIS association-affiliated journals (4 of 18) are published by traditional publishers (Table 2, 3).

Journal Publishing Models & Practices
A majority of the journals publish in print and online, with 32% of the 53 responses publishing only online. Two journals publish only in print. Notably, 25% of the 53 respondents indicate that their publication has undergone a change in publication practices (change in format, OA status, publisher) in the last year. (At the time of data collection, summer 2014, this response would indicate changes occurring between 2012-2014.) Of 50 respondents, 44% indicate their journals are OA. It is notable that a higher proportion of those journals affiliated with professional associations are OA, as compared to those unaffiliated with professional associations (Table 4). Not all of the 22 OA journals follow the same OA model-19% make articles OA after an embargo period, and 33% collect APCs. Green OA practices-allowing deposit of pre or post-print article versions into repositories-are also supported by LIS journals. Preprint manuscripts are those that have been submitted but have not undergone peer-review.
Post-print manuscripts are those that have undergone peer-review and have been accepted for publication. Both pre-print and post-print manuscripts will most likely differ from an article's final, published version. These definitions were not included in the survey instrument. The majority of journals in this study (75% of 48 respondents), permit author deposit of pre-print articles into institutional repositories; 67% of 47 respondents allow post-print deposit; and 58% of 45 respondents allow deposit of final published articles into institutional repositories. Embargo periods, if any, vary as well (Table 5).
This shows that OA in LIS publishing operates using a variety of OA mechanisms and models. Unsurprisingly, traditional publishers do not publish the majority of OA journals.

Journal Peer Review Practices
Reported peer-review practices are much more homogenous than reported OA practices. An overwhelming majority of journals (90% of 42 respondents) use a double-blind peerreview process; 7% (of 42 respondents) use a single-blind review process; and only one (2%) publication uses open review, disclosing referee and author identities to one another. OA journals typically use more referees than do non-OA journals, trending to three to four reviewers over the one or two reported by non-OA journals. This finding may contradict a popularly held notion that OA publications are of lesser quality than traditionally-published journals, or it may reflect OA journal editors' practical responses of utilizing more referees in order to allay criticisms of journal quality. More evidence is needed to support either claim.
14% of 42 respondents report that, in the past two years, authors have requested the journal to open its review process. No respondents indicate their journal has been approached by authors with a request to close the peer-review process. A minority of the journal editorial boards (12% of 42 respondents) have discussed changing peer-review processes. Of those journals discussing review processes, three considered open review and one considered moving from single to double-blind review. As one respondent mentions, "In our field it is easy to know who the author is because it is a small pond. Blind reviewing in this context is pretty much nonsense." It is interesting to note that although editorial boards discussed opening review processes, respondents did not report implementing them. In fact, survey results document two journals with changes to their peer-review process-either instituting or strengthening double-blind review.
To the final survey question ("If the technological system you use to manage article submissions and reviews allowed for an open peer review option, would you enable this feature?"), the majority of OA journal editors' responded "maybe." Those journals responding "no" to this question overwhelmingly represented non-OA journals published by traditional publishers (Table 6). Responses as to why editors would or would not enable the OPR feature are mixed. Several editors assert that their current processes work well, and they do not see a need to change.

Yes No
Positive responses allude to journals that use open review and show general support for the concept: • "Interesting concept" • "It does and we do" • "I'm editorially pro-open review. In some cases we've supported this with comment press. I'd like to make it easier to turn on." Those that would consider enabling open review consistently acknowledge the need for further discussion with editorial boards and their community at large.
• "I'd like to examine the pros and cons of it before" • "It might be interesting, at least at first, to offer open peer review as an option. To see if folks want it and also to assess it, as compared to blind review." • "This would have to be discussed with and agreed by others." Additionally, comments point to a need to better understand OPR before implementing it. "I would need to learn more about it, and how I would manage conflicting reviewer comments.
As the editor, if there are conflicting reviewer comments, I weigh in as well, and sometimes even withhold some reviewer comments from the author." Such responses show the depth of the conversations editors, authors, and reviewers need to have prior to implementing any OPR model.
Negative responses point to concerns of validity, quality, and other perceived problems with OPR: • "[We] require quality reviews!" • "I believe that blind review is more effective." • "We believe double-blind review is important to ensure equity and fairness across all categories of authors from all types of institutions." • "Open Peer Review tends to allow for too many extreme remarks, usually from people who don't themselves publish!" These responses elucidate journal editors' concerns about OPR. They also indicate a direction for further research that will either counter or support concerns regarding OPR's efficacy, impacts on fairness, and the tone of reviewers' comments.

DISCUSSION
It is unsurprising that the survey results show a correlation between OA journals and those whose editors are willing to consider opening the peer-review process. Similarly, OA and association-affiliated journals more frequently provide editor contact information on journal websites, showing a greater disposition toward transparency. One could argue that traditional journals, on the other hand, demonstrate more opacity in their publishing practices as well as in one's ability to contact editors.
The majority of LIS journals are still not OA, which poses a barrier to experimenting with OPR, despite the fact that OPR does not rely on a journal's OA status. OA journals in LIS already have more transparent publishing practices, so for them further opening review is not as much of an ideological shift as it is for traditionally-published journals.
Conversations about OPR in LIS publications have not been widespread and have not led to the adoption of a consistent definition. OPR processes at LIS publications are rare, and since OPR is defined and approached in a multitude of ways, even editors who claim familiarity with the concept may not fully understand it. In response to the survey's last question, "If the technological system you use to manage article submissions / and reviews allowed for an open peer review option, would you / enable this feature?" one editor stated, "It is already an open access journal," conflating OA with OPR. Based on these comments, it is logical to conclude that the LIS discipline needs to better understand the purpose of OPR, as well as its practices and varied implementations. Better understanding OPR would allow LIS practitioners to better engage in and lead conversations about evolving scholarly communication practices in academic publishing at large.
Negative responses to OPR point to editors' concerns regarding OPR's validity, quality, fairness, and potential negative impacts on authors' and reviewers' reputations. While these concerns should not be ignored, there is little evidence to substantiate them. Respondents often used opinion-based words, such as "believe," in conjunction with their negative comments. None of these responses acknowledge direct negative experiences with OPR; negative reactions appear to be based on supposition. To gain direct experience with OPR, LIS journals will need to implement OPR experiments.
One of the most complex issues facing OPR is that of academic culture and processes: grant-seeking, promotion, and tenure. To de-couple OPR from the pressures, behaviors, and existing systems in the academy would be a disservice. At its core, OPR challenges traditional notions of academic review for publication as well as for review of grants, promotion, and tenure. Respondents who negatively reacted to OPR based on academic traditions point to interpretations of regulations and academic culture, rather than direct experience. For example, one respondent indicated that UK governmental assessment of research regulations disallows publication in OPR journals. "Many of my authors would view this as devaluing the process and they need to publish in a true double blind journal for tenure track and in the UK for governmental assessments of research." Despite this assertion, it is unclear whether there are express rules against inclusion of scholarly works that have undergone OPR in these assessments. It is possible that this quote signifies an interpretation of guidelines, or it signifies accepted norms in the academic culture, rather than an outright ban on publishing in OPR journals. More research is needed to understand whether funding and assessment agencies deliberately exclude works undergoing OPR.
Another respondent points to scholarly prestige and reputation, notions that are deeply ingrained in academic culture. "…Peers may not be as excited about serious reviewing if they are not rewarded (adding to one's CV a section about official requests for blind peer review is more prestigious, I think)." The academy will either need to be convinced that prestige and reputation can be maintained with OPR, or it will need to dismantle its notions of reputation. Potential experiments with alternative review models undertaken by "prestigious" and "reputable" flagship journals, such as College & Research Libraries, are much more likely to affect the LIS community's acceptance of OPR.
Just as OPR can confuse journal editors, it is logical that review committees and administrators are similarly ignorant and/or skeptical of alternative review methods. The academy is grappling with "what counts as scholarship," as more scholarly conversations and impacts have moved from traditional publishing and dissemination patterns to include online, distributed scholarship such as scholarly blogs, position papers, and commentary. Whether these works "count" towards an individual's scholarship in a bid for promotion and tenure is still under question, and in this conversation OPR is an added question mark.
In this survey one editor reports utilizing an OPR process. With so few LIS publications putting OPR into practice, we know very little of its successes and limitations. The LIS community will never discover more about OPR if it does not attempt, examine, and evaluate it. Fortunately, journal editors are open to exploring OPR. Free-text survey responses and the large proportion of OA journal editors willing to experiment with OPR show that the LIS community is ready for deeper conversations about it. There is no doubt that editors would approach new review models thoughtfully and engage with their communities to discuss them.
Finally, this survey shows that OPR presents social and cultural challenges to the LIS field. One editor points to cultural norms within an association's publication, asserting that " [t] he Editorial Board and association members prefer double-blind peer review." It is unclear from this statement whether association and editorial board members at this journal are aware of OPR, or if the journal editor has attempted to discuss OPR with her community. It is possible that the LIS community at large does not understand OPR well enough to know whether it would like to engage with it.
Taken together, survey responses point to a need for the LIS publishing community to continue conversations about OPR and to study and understand its implementations and practices. Any implementation of OPR will need to address the LIS publishing community's needs, and OPR's purpose should be defined by those needs. To that end, conversations will need to identify what are the LIS publishing community's needs in order to address them. While the LIS literature surfaces the need to encourage and support librarians as they write and publish, there is a paucity of literature addressing the community's publishing needs. As such, more research is needed in this regard.
At the same time, LIS journal editors, authors, and reviewers can work to draft and implement OPR processes, drawing on the expertise of those few journals in our field that offer it. Experiments with OPR will facilitate the discovery of opportunities and challenges that OPR presents in LIS, uncover unintended consequences of changes in review processes, and elucidate some of the needs of the LIS publishing community.
Based on their support of and engagement with OA, journals of LIS professional associations and other OA journals in the discipline are positioned to tackle OPR experiments. Journal editors interested in OPR will need to work with their communities to develop and implement author, editorial, and review guidelines, as well as manage workflows associated with any change in a peer-review process. Experimentation can be done in concert with exploration and study of OPR implemented in other disciplines. Taken together, experimentation with and study of OPR can support librarian-led innovation in scholarly communication. Librarians will need to consult with disciplinary colleagues and scholarly communities with regard to opening review and publication processes. In short, this work will be a simple extension of the conversations many librarians already have with disciplinary colleagues regarding OA.

CONCLUSION
It is clear that the LIS community needs more conversation about and engagement with OPR. We do not collectively understand the LIS community's scholarly publishing needs, nor do we understand OPR and its implications for the LIS publishing landscape. The apparent ideological split in LIS publications between association-affiliated and/or OA journals and traditionally-published journals shows that part of our publishing community is more amenable to openness. As such it follows that any future engagement and experimentation with OPR will most certainly occur in OA publications.
Opening peer-review processes generates more questions than answers, but librarians are wellpositioned to explore them. As librarians we advise colleagues regarding publishing and review practices in disciplinary fields. As authors and editors we engage with our own scholarly publications. I maintain that librarians and LIS journal editors should begin to experiment with OPR in collaboration with LIS journal publishers and the LIS community at large. When we come to understand OPR, it will inform our day-to-day work, and perhaps influence scholarly publishing in other disciplines. What we might learn from publishing in our own discipline would enable us to better communicate with a broad community of scholars. As openness in publishing progresses, it might follow that other publishing practices are opened up, such as making readily available journal editor contact information. If those who are actively engaged in scholarly publishing-such as journal editors-do not understand OPR, the rest of the profession will lag even further behind.
To borrow journalist Christopher Hitchens's words "…extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence" (Hitchens, 2003, para. 8). It is only after we experiment with OPR that we can prove or disprove claims and concerns expressed by the editors responding to this survey and discover the opportunities and challenges that OPR presents.

APPENDIX Survey Instrument
Q1 What is the title of your journal?
Q2 Which option most closely describes the focus of your journal?