Open Peer Review for a Transparent and Engaging Scientific Environment: Towards a FAIR Journal

Curating research data to ensure it is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) is gaining increasing importance in engineering sciences. ing.grid – FAIR Data Management in Engineering Sciences is a Diamond Open Access journal that provides a publishing platform for this field. As this field is being established, scientific discussion is of vital importance. Today, peer review hides much of the scientific discussion from the community and the public. In contrast, ing.grid uses an open peer review process that shows reviews, author responses and editor comments alongside the submitted preprints. By bringing the peer review process into the open, ing.grid ensures transparency and accountability and engages the relevant community.

The hybrid open peer review concept is put into practice using the Janeway preprint server and journal platforms: After submission via the preprint repository, reviewers, editors, authors and community members post comments. The review comments are specially flagged. Once manuscripts are accepted, they are sent to the journal through a custom-built interface and typesetting. Finally, they are published as peer reviewed articles. ing.grid relies on the support of the publishing services provided by the University and State Library at Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany). The library facilitates the TUjournals press site for scholar-led Diamond Open Access journals.

This cooperation allows ing.grid to draw on the library’s cataloguing and long term archiving experience. Moreover, common effort is made to develop a knowledge graph representing the journal. This will lead to improved discovery of published research and the transparency of interconnections between different contributions.