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Opening Peer Review Through Narrative Inquiry (ACRL Publications in Librarianship No Portland State University PDXScholar Library Faculty Publications and Presentations University Library 7-2021 Stories of Open: Opening Peer Review through Narrative Inquiry (ACRL Publications in Librarianship No. 76) Emily Ford Portland State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/ulib_fac Part of the Scholarly Communication Commons, and the Scholarly Publishing Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Citation Details Ford, Emily. (2021). Stories of Open: Opening Peer Review Through Narrative Inquiry. CHICAGO: ASSN COLL & RESEARCH LIB. This Book is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Library Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. ACRL PUBLICATIONS IN LIBRARIANSHIP NO. 76 Stories ofOPEN Opening Peer Review through Narrative Inquiry Emily Ford Association of College and Research Libraries A division of the American Library Association Chicago, Illinois 2021 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞ Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940509 Copyright ©2021 by Emily Ford. This work is issued under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license CC BY-NC 4.0. All rights reserved except those which may be granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976. Printed in the United States of America. 24 23 22 21 20 5 4 3 2 1 Contents v Acknowledgements PART 1: ORIENTATION 3 Chapter 1—A Meta-story: The Story of Stories of Open 13 Chapter 2—Discovering Method: Narrative Inquiry PART 2: THE STORIES (THE STORY MIDDLE) 31 Chapter 3—The Elusive Norm: Peer Review in LIS 53 Chapter 4—Roles of Peer Review 91 Chapter 5—Dualities and Multiplicities in Peer Review 119 Chapter 6—Collaborative Work and Discourse Community 137 Chapter 7—Transparency of Peer-Review Process PART 3: CODA 157 Chapter 8—Storying Stories 183 Chapter 9—I Just Feel Like This Makes Sense to Me: Stuart’s Story In collaboration with Stuart Lawson 213 Chapter 10—The Next Layer of Publishing Transparency: Open Peer Review 233 Chapter 11—Crafting Future Stories of Open iii Acknowledgements his book has been a work of community. Without the ten individuals who T gave their time to converse with me, review transcripts, think deeply, and who were unafraid to be authentic and vulnerable in our interactions, this book would not exist. There wouldn’t be stories to share, and I would not have learned or grown as much as I did throughout this process. I thank you wholeheartedly. This book is ours. Additional thanks to Stuart Lawson, who was willing to make their entire interpretive story open with their identity publicly disclosed. Your dedication to and advocacy for openness is exemplary. Bob Schroeder, your excitement to read multiple drafts of each chapter kept me going. Thank you for being such a good compatriot along this journey into the research of lived experiences. My thanks to John Budd, who read and commented on the entire book draft, offering me readings and philosophical paths I would not have otherwise discovered. Additional thanks to Miriam Rigby and Sarah Ford, who read large portions of this manuscript draft and whose knowledge in their own research areas assisted my thinking. Thanks to Erin Nevius, who was willing to work with me on the open access license and agreed to make this book openly available upon publication. Daniel Mack, thank you for being an open peer review advocate, and for agreeing to have this book published in the Publications in Librarianship series as its inaugural openly reviewed manuscript. Similarly, thank you to the review- ers—Lorelei Tanji, Dr. James Kessenides, Kathy Essmiller, and the Publications in Librarianship Editorial Board—whose reviewing tasks coincided with March 2020. Your dedication to completing this task despite world events is heroic. Finally, this book belongs to all of us, any reader who takes anything away from the stories shared, or who reflects on the questions I offer. This book belongs to you, too. Funding for research conducted in support of this work was provided by a Portland State University Faculty Development Grant. v PART 1 Orientation 1 Chapter 1 A Meta-story: The Story of Stories of Open WHY THIS BOOK? “It’s just a process that hasn’t been questioned in forever, and it needs to be,” said Cheryl as we were sitting in a small study room at a branch of our local public library. The faint smell of cigarettes lingered in the study room from its previous occupant, and muffled giggles and cries of children filtered in as we spoke. I was fooling with my laptop, trying to get pertinent documents in Word to function, despite the corrupted install job that had been completed on my new grant- funded laptop. It didn’t work, and I felt flustered. Despite this setback, I was ready to learn from her. What did she have to share of her experience, and what kind of meaning would we create together in this hour and a half? We were talking about peer review. I had asked Cheryl why she wanted to participate in this project as an interviewee. When she said it, I didn’t know that it would be the title of her interpretive narrative, the document culmi- nating from our conversation, nor did I know that it would be how I opened this book. For years, since my time as a cofounder and editor at In the Library with the Lead Pipe, a peer-reviewed blog turned journal, I have been fascinated by open peer review. Our open peer-review process was something we invented as we began the journal and something that I discovered to be invaluable during that time. Yet over the years I have learned that it’s not widely accepted or understood. Perhaps people fear it because it’s unknown, or we simply have naivete—we don’t know anything different. We, academic librarians, don’t collectively know it. Few of us have experienced it, and most of us don’t understand it. Recently I was catching up on my podcast listening and was delighted to hear Radiolab’s Latif Nasser talking about how he finds stories. “I tell myself that there are 7.5 billion people on planet earth… and if you presume that one percent of those 7.5 billion people have those stories… There’s no way all those stories are getting told.… There’s… an infinity of stories all around us.”1 I truly believe that 3 4 Chapter 1 when we open ourselves to others’ experiences, we in turn reflect on our own. We have much to learn about ourselves by listening to others. That is why I’ve approached my work in stories, and that is why stories matter. This book is as much about discovering method and process as it is about sharing the stories I gathered. I hope that this book will incite our academic library community to reflect on our own experiences and imagine the possibilities of creating new and improved ones. Readers who wish to discover answers to tightly scoped research questions backed by deep dives into academic literature and evidence will be highly disappointed. This book does not do that. Rather, its intent is to share collective discoveries and explorations on a theme. It is here to share our colleagues’ stories so that we may reflect on our own and potentially reimagine future stories. OPEN PEER REVIEW While chapter 10, “The Next Layer of Publishing Transparency: Open Peer Review,” provides a closer look at open peer review, it remains pertinent to discuss it broadly in this introduction. Just what do we mean by open peer review? Although I and others have attempted to unpack this seemingly simple question, there still is no simple definition or application. Essentially, open peer review is an opening up of the peer-review process. It could mean that referees sign their reviews for authors to see, as may occur at BioMed Central journals. “Open peer review as practised by BMC, specifically refers to open identities and open content, i.e. authors know who the reviewers are and if the manuscript is accepted for publication the named reviewer reports accompany the published article.”2 I particularly love this framing of open peer review because it positions the process as a practice, and each person, each community, may practice something in a different way. And this is how it shakes out. Each implementation of open peer review, as I have observed, is different and nuanced. Some implementations allow for the publication of reviewer reports alongside publications, whereas others keep these reviewer reports opaque. Just as some view open access as a way to democratize scholarly publishing, many see open peer review as affording similar opportunities. With open peer review we can shorten time lines between manuscript submission and publica- tion, hold reviewers accountable for their work, make more apparent the hidden labor of reviewing and editing, allow for collaborative discourse between authors and reviewers, and more. Some of these arguments are deterministic, just as argu- ments regarding open access being the great democratizer of journal publishing are. In fact, anything open is highly nuanced and contextual. Ultimately, when A Meta-story 5 we discuss “open,” we must discuss the stories around it. To what aim? What are the pitfalls? What are the gains? And are we trying to simply replicate a broken system instead of reinventing it? Open peer review may also mean that authors have the opportunity to more deeply and meaningfully engage with referees.
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