PRO Initiative update
An update two months into the PRO Initiative…
I just sent the following to the PRO Initiative mailing list. I thought those who have opted not to receive PRO-related emails, or who are not (yet?) signatories, might appreciate the update as well.
Dear fellow PRO signatory,
It has now been a few months since the PRO initiative started, and there are some big updates that I’d like to share with you. First, in general, I’ve been receiving news via email from some signatories regarding their first attempts at invoking PRO with an editor. These engagements run the gamut from very positive (e.g. changing the journal submission documents in response) to expected (editor sends request to authors, authors have no problem with sharing or giving reason) to negative (editor refuses to engage). Even in the case of the negative engagements we hope that PRO reviewers raising the issue will have a cumulative effect on the editors; see below for a way in which we will try to track PRO’s effectiveness (thanks to Tom Hardwicke!).
In specific news, Nature News and Comment has written a brief piece that touches on PRO. Gert Storms, a PRO signatory, played an important role in raising open data/materials issues in review with the editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. In this case, the collective nature of PRO was helpful in getting dialogue started with the editor in chief. There are almost 400 signatories to PRO; as more people sign on, it will be increasingly evident that openness is an issue that people care about and are willing to act on. You can read the article here: http://www.nature.com/news/peer-review-activists-push-psychology-journals-towards-open-data-1.21549
If you have any PRO related news or a comment about how the PRO process has worked for you, please contact me. I’d be very interested in hearing about it.
Finally, in an effort to make the PRO process even easier and to gather less anecdotal evidence about PRO, Tom Hardwicke has developed an online app for PRO reviewers. You can use the app to create PRO responses based on the manuscripts you get to review (using a convenient form) and to store information about how each PRO response has been handled. This will help us to understand better how editors react to PRO.
The app can be found at: https://metapro-325ca.firebaseapp.com/
Tom has provided the following description of the app:
“The PRO Initiative (PRO-I) is a unique grassroots effort to promote open research, and your experiences as a PRO-I reviewer will contain a rich body of information about the barriers you face, the successes you achieve, and the effectiveness of the initiative as a whole. We want to try and capture as much of that information as possible.
“With this in mind, we have built The PRO-I Reviewing App — a simple web interface where you can quickly compose your PRO-I reviews using an interactive checklist. The checklist dynamically updates to ensure that you are only asked the minimum number of questions needed to establish whether a manuscript meets the PRO-I criteria or not. We hope that the app will save you time by making the reviewing process more efficient. You can also record author and editor reactions to your reviews, helping us to identify areas where additional efforts to promote open research may be needed, such as researcher training.
“Head over to the app to find out more and give it a go:
https://metapro-325ca.firebaseapp.com/
“You’re welcome to get in touch if you have comments, feedback, or questions about the project:
tom.hardwicke@stanford.edu”
We hope you find the app useful, and that we can continue to improve the situation for open science throughout 2017 and beyond.
Best,
Richard
