Historical assessment of three extinct portable peer review and cascade peer review models

Abstract

Portable peer review (PPR) refers to peer review that is not conducted by a journal but instead by externally recruited peers whose reports are then made available to that journal’s editors. In theory, this would alleviate a journal editor’s responsibilities and potentially benefit authors by shortening the time to a decision. While the upside to this model is self-evident, PPR suffers from potential biases since knowledge by the reviewer that they will be paid may skew the outcome of peer review. In one form of PPR, cascade peer review (CPR), a rejected paper is passed down, or cascaded, often to a lower-tier journal within the same publisher’s journal fleet, usually accompanied by the rejected journal’s reviewer reports. CPR might be perceived as unfair to other authors who have passed a more standard route of rejection and resubmission to the same journal. For these reasons, papers that used either external PPR, or internal CPR, should transparently indicate this fact in both HTML and PDF versions of the paper so that an impression is not created that the authors, journal and publisher are concealing an important part of that paper’s publication history. Three experimental paid PPR services (Rubriq, Axios Review, and Peerage of Science) that have now ceased to exist are examined in detail to appreciate their potential weaknesses, allowing academics to learn possible pitfalls in PPR and CPR models. Three reasons might explain their failure and/or lack of adoption: 1) opacity of the use and acknowledgement of such services, thus being a potential ethical infraction; 2) the creation of a two-tier system that favors only well-funded authors who are able to pay for such an exclusive service; 3) risk of peer review bias.