Cross-Cutting Improvements: Open Science to Improve the Publish-Review-Curate-Assessment Workflow

Current processes of scientific communication limit researchers’ ability to share findings with the general public and other researchers, slowing the progress of science. This project addresses the issues by removing financial barriers to participation for authors and readers; building community-based, post-publication review processes; and developing open, values-enacted research assessment metrics. Seven community testbeds are implementing a Publish-Review-Curate-Assess workflow; documenting the work with these communities establishes reproducible models that bring scientific communication into alignment with the goals of open science. Open Science requires building a Publish-Review-Curate-Assess workflow within integrated systems. PUBLISH: By establishing community-based platforms for hosting and disseminating scientific research, the project can eliminate restrictions imposed by proprietary systems in the form of publishing fees and subscription costs. This enables new work to be made public immediately via preprint servers or disciplinary repositories, moving the endorsement phase of the communication process to post-publication. REVIEW: By transforming review from a publisher-controlled process to one designed and overseen by the research community, review processes can become part of the scientific conversation, allowing reviewers to be credited with their insights and researchers to participate in the engagement with their work. CURATE: By leveraging a multi-institutional, open-source publishing platform, the project enables research communities to select and endorse the best current research. ASSESS: Full attention to impact requires better analytics for research assessment to be made more openly available. By leveraging a multi-institutional, open-source publishing platform, the project can aggregate information to measure the impact of research, returning control of analytics to research institutions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.