Manuscripts, the text of a scholarly argument, regardless of length.Proposals, the initial statement of argument(s), intended audience, engagement with other existing texts, and proposed structure of the work (more typical in monograph publishing)Datasets, the accumulation of evidence by scholars upon which an argument is based, and which can be shared with other scholars who seek to replicate an author’s argument or explore further pathways of inquiry (more typical in the natural and social sciences, but increasingly found in digital humanities fields).

In proposing a delineation between closed and open forms of review, our organizing principle is the information available to the reader about the content of review. This means that if the identities of authors and reviewers are known to each other, but not to readers, we regard that as a form of closed review.

We now call on such gatherings of stakeholders as the Association of University Presses, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Library Publishing Forum to take up this conversation both within their own constituencies and in collaboration with each other.

It must be extensible, able to accommodate the emergence of new broadly shared definitions and widely implemented processes.

In conversation, participants speculated about creating a standard suite of metadata to describe the peer review process a publication has undergone. These metadata can become a standard part of the Crossref schema and thus a standard part of each article or book’s metadata

It might be the case that an existing entity might see this initiative as a logical extension of its own mission within scholarly communication, seeking to provide the offices of a central registry and the function of oversight.

That said, in both article and (to a greater extent) monograph publishing, there can be a variety of reviewers whose insights shape the final published result—scholarly peers, to be sure, but in addition professional staff editors, a series editor, or members of an editorial board.

A published book, by contrast, may be subjected to review at a number of stages—the author’s full proposal, the submitted manuscript, even a revised manuscript

Datasets are increasingly viewed not merely as instrumentalities, but as scholarly objects in themselves; and questions touching on the experimental and/or research methodologies by which they were compiled, the validity of statistical significance argued on the basis of the data, and the availability to other scholars of data upon which an argument is based are taken in view by review processes.

In contrast to the work of scholarly journals, the practice of peer review in the world of scholarly monographs has not been deeply examined.

Indeed, a search of the term “peer review” in the Google books database (Figure 2) shows that the phrase only emerges in the late 1950s, and only becomes a widespread term of art in the last twenty years of the twentieth century

the purpose of “peer review” had more to do with defending and maintaining the boundaries between members and non-members of the (selective, private) scholarly societies—and, by extension, protecting the reputation, and the exclusivity, of those organizations.

Only in 1752, nearly ninety years after Philosophical Transactions first appeared, did the Royal Society assume editorial control of the journal

That model (Figure 1) has as a central focus identifying what has been reviewed (a proposal? A complete manuscript? A dataset?); who has done the reviewing (a scholarly peer? An editor? A reader?); and how the work has been reviewed, on a spectrum of fully closed to completely open.

While inherent to the meaning of “scholarly publication” is a process for evaluation—the peer review process—it is by no means clear that scholarly publishers have established a simple, meaningful, and uniform means of providing readers with information about how that process was brought to bear on the work in their hands

We set out a proposed taxonomy of types of peer review, offering the idea of a first-order division between “closed” (or historically, but somewhat archaically, “blind) and “open” forms of review, acknowledging that new forms of the latter sort are emerging as more responsive to the needs of an increasing number of fields

In undertaking this work, we had in view the example of the system developed and implemented by the efforts of Creative Commons to make possible for authors, artists, and content-creators the communication of the rights they are willing to share with users of their works

the creation of a shared means of denoting this fundamental (and costly) practice of scholarly publishers.

But one distinctive and identifying characteristic they hold in common is the practice of some form of review of a proposed publication by qualified expert referees as part of the decision process in committing to publishing—the practice of peer review.