One of the things we want the Open Research Computation journal to do is bring more of the transparency and open critique that characterises the best Open Source Software development processes into the scholarly peer review process. But you can talk about changing the way peer review works and you can actively do something about. Michael Barton and Hazel Barton have taken matters into their own hands and thrown the doors completely open. They have submitted a paper to ORC and in parallel asked the community on the BioStar site how the paper and software could be improved. - Cameron Neylon

"By not restricting commentary to a small number of people we stand a better chance of getting all the appropriate points of view represented." - best practise IMHO for the journal's topic. As you may of course know, the method of parallel open and closed peer reviewing is being practised by Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, ACP (has been since about 2003) http://www.atmospheric-chemist...: "interactive discussion and public commenting by the referees, authors and other members of the scientific community is expected to enhance quality control for papers published in ACP beyond the limits of the traditional closed peer-review." Some details re restrictions on "open": "Short Comments (SC) can be posted by any registered member of the scientific community (free online registration). Such comments are attributed, i.e. published under the name of the commentator." http://www.atmospheric-chemist... - key issue, I guess: who qualifies as a "member of the scientific community" in which context? - Claudia Koltzenburg

Yes, I should have mentioned ACP as an example of a similar thing... - Cameron Neylon

We opened up our writing process and invited comments for our PZQ paper (http://openwetware.org/wiki...) but recently went to a closed Word version just to get it actually ready for submission... Don't think many journals will accept a web page draft as a submission? (Discuss, 25 marks) - Matthew Todd

well, Matthew, why not finalise the draft in the open? and actually I think journals should be made to accept *especially* submissions that were drafted (and maybe also finalised) in the open :-) honestly, I see no reason why e.g. our journal (CTT) should not accept any open science articles... I am waiting for our author teams to take exactly this step (or any other pro-open-science ones) for that matter - Claudia Koltzenburg

It's mainly because the switch to Word is to get things ready for submission, and we weren't expecting any big changes in the process (which didn't turn out to be quite right, actually), and the things we were attending to were mainly cosmetic. But it was assembled on OWW for quite a while first. - Matthew Todd

Word document in a public dropbox folder is a stopgap for this stage of the process. Also avoids the horrendous email attachment debacle that inevitably ensues... - Cameron Neylon

maybe actually we need a kind of http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ (but interactive & open) to make visible how the traditional cramps/cranks (?) are crumbling in journal policies and how/where open science habits among authors are more and more accepted on the publisher side (plus: the better the authors who go open and refuse submitting anything in formats like eh .doc... just imagine how we could speed up the process to go open everything on the scientific web :-) - Claudia Koltzenburg

Was the need for Word based on better formatting capabilities? Maybe Google Docs would provide more features while keeping the document online. - Mike Chelen