Gender Bias in Peer Review panels

Schiffbaenker, Hélène; Besselaar, Peter van den; Holzinger, Florian; Mom, Charlie; Vinkenburg, C.J.

doi:10.4324/9780429198625-9

“…However, the traditional peer review process in practice is not the bastion of academic rigour claimed in theory, and problems rooted in both the process itself and in human interactions are increasingly being identified. These problems are outlined briefly here, and are well documented elsewhere (e.g., Wennerås & Wold 1997;Smith 1999Smith , 2006Tregenza 2002;Bornmann et al 2007;Hauser & Fehr 2007;Budden et al 2008;Newton 2010;Helmer et al 2017;Williams 2020;Niriella et al 2021;Berhe et al 2022;Schiffbaenker et al 2022;Heidt 2023;Liu et al 2023).…”

Section: Review Processesmentioning

confidence: 80%

Diamond open access with preregistration: a new publishing model for palaeontology

Drage,

Wong Hearing

2023

Preprint

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The current academic publishing model is systemically unfit for purpose. The academic publishing ecosystem is dominated by a few large for-profit publishing houses which, at every stage of the publication process, transform academic work and public resources into private profit. Although extracting substantial profits, these publishing houses themselves add little value to the final published work, impose policies that strip copyright from authors and institutions, and bake in opaque and sometimes discriminatory gatekeeping to the publication process. Systemic problems in academic publishing have for decades been suggested to hinder access to academic research, suppress original thought, bias the publishing process against people with protected characteristics, and simultaneously provoke unnecessary changes to articles whilst failing to improve the quality of flawed work. The diamond open access (DOA) journal model addresses many of these issues, particularly financial accessibility and authors’ retention of copyright. Some publishers, such as the geoscience-specialist Copernicus Publications, have developed protocols to increase transparency and efficacy in review processes, and others have made recent moves towards including preregistration of research protocols with the aim of bolstering the rigour of the academic process. However, publishing options that offer all these facilities are few and far between. In palaeontology there is a notable paucity of transparent open science publications, with only a handful of discipline-specific options for DOA publishing. Here, we present a new publishing model that builds in financial accessibility, transparency, and accountability from the ground up. This model is broadly applicable across academic publishing, including to academic palaeontology. The new model incorporates community-driven DOA publishing procedures, a broad-access and transparent peer review system, research protocol preregistration, and a systematic but flexible approach to publishing work at various stages throughout the research process. We aim to demonstrate the potential of a more flexible, more transparent, more equitable academic publishing model, and declare our intention to establish a new palaeontology journal rooted in these principles.

show abstract

“…However, the traditional peer review process in practice is not the bastion of academic rigour claimed in theory, and problems rooted in both the process itself and in human interactions are increasingly being identified. These problems are outlined briefly here, and are well documented elsewhere (e.g., Wennerås & Wold 1997;Smith 1999Smith , 2006Tregenza 2002;Bornmann et al 2007;Hauser & Fehr 2007;Budden et al 2008;Newton 2010;Helmer et al 2017;Williams 2020;Niriella et al 2021;Berhe et al 2022;Schiffbaenker et al 2022;Heidt 2023;Liu et al 2023).…”

Section: Review Processesmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Traditional, single-blind, peer review structures have been described as "suppress[ing] original thought" and "coerc[ing] authors into unnecessary revisions" (Newton 2010 and references therein), as well as being a "slow, expensive, profligate [waste] of academic time, highly subjective, prone to bias, easily abused, poor at detecting gross defects, and almost useless for detecting fraud" (Smith 1999). More recent studies, reinforced by widespread anecdotal evidence, have found that this traditional peer review model in publication and grant reviewing negatively impacts researchers with protected characteristics and from marginalised backgrounds (e.g., Roberts et al 2020;Niriella et al 2021;Kern-Goldberger et al 2022;Schiffbaenker et al 2022;Liu et al 2023).…”

Section: Review Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Systemic biases against researchers from marginalised backgrounds manifest as fewer successful grant and publication outcomes for those researchers as well as personally harmful comments from reviewers towards those researchers (Wennerås & Wold 1997;Tregenza 2002;Bornmann et al 2007;Budden et al 2008;Pierson 2014;Berhe et al 2022;Schiffbaenker et al 2022;Liu et al 2023) which intrinsically advantages the majority group and disadvantages people from marginalised or minority groups, is an acknowledged factor in peer review outcomes (Wennerås & Wold 1997;Pierson 2014;Cochran 2016). These problems are not simple to fix, and it is hard to envisage a process that can fully replace the review of work by subject-specific colleagues who understand how it should be done and why it matters.…”

Section: Review Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Diamond open access with preregistration: a new publishing model for palaeontology

Drage,

Wong Hearing

2023

Preprint

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The current academic publishing model is systemically unfit for purpose. The academic publishing ecosystem is dominated by a few large for-profit publishing houses which, at every stage of the publication process, transform academic work and public resources into private profit. Although extracting substantial profits, these publishing houses themselves add little value to the final published work, impose policies that strip copyright from authors and institutions, and bake in opaque and sometimes discriminatory gatekeeping to the publication process. Systemic problems in academic publishing have for decades been suggested to hinder access to academic research, suppress original thought, bias the publishing process against people with protected characteristics, and simultaneously provoke unnecessary changes to articles whilst failing to improve the quality of flawed work. The diamond open access (DOA) journal model addresses many of these issues, particularly financial accessibility and authors’ retention of copyright. Some publishers, such as the geoscience-specialist Copernicus Publications, have developed protocols to increase transparency and efficacy in review processes, and others have made recent moves towards including preregistration of research protocols with the aim of bolstering the rigour of the academic process. However, publishing options that offer all these facilities are few and far between. In palaeontology there is a notable paucity of transparent open science publications, with only a handful of discipline-specific options for DOA publishing. Here, we present a new publishing model that builds in financial accessibility, transparency, and accountability from the ground up. This model is broadly applicable across academic publishing, including to academic palaeontology. The new model incorporates community-driven DOA publishing procedures, a broad-access and transparent peer review system, research protocol preregistration, and a systematic but flexible approach to publishing work at various stages throughout the research process. We aim to demonstrate the potential of a more flexible, more transparent, more equitable academic publishing model, and declare our intention to establish a new palaeontology journal rooted in these principles.

show abstract

“…In most interviews, the respondents indicate that the 'total picture' is taken into consideration. Research about selection procedures for panel evaluations for grants of the European Research Council panels (ERC) showed that non-systematic application of the criteria leads to discrimination against women candidates (Schiffbaenker et al, 2022). Three 'biases' play a role in discrimination towards women candidates: 'double standards' (different weighting of women and men on the same criterion), 'halo effects' (a good assessment on one of the criteria 'contaminates' the assessments of the other criteria) and 'homosocial reproduction' (selectors recognize quality sooner in people who resemble them).…”

Section: Policies Versus Practice: Decision-maker Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Worth of a Talent? Pay Inequality in Universities

van Engen,

Kroon

2024

Talent Management in Higher Education

1

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Little research is devoted to how salary allocation processes interfere with gender inequality in talent development in universities. Administrative data from a university indicated a substantial salary gap between men and women academics, which partially could be explained by the unequal distribution of men and women in the academic job levels after acquiring a PhD, from lecturer to full professor, with men being overrepresented in the higher job levels, as well as in the more senior positions within each job level. We demonstrated how a lack of transparency, consistency and accountability can disqualify apparent fair, merit-based salary decisions and result in biased gender differences in job and salary levels. This chapter reflects on how salary decisions matter for the recognition of talent and should be an integral part of talent management.

show abstract

Gender Bias in Peer Review panels

Cited by 4 publications

References 40 publications

Diamond open access with preregistration: a new publishing model for palaeontology

Diamond open access with preregistration: a new publishing model for palaeontology

Diamond open access with preregistration: a new publishing model for palaeontology

The Worth of a Talent? Pay Inequality in Universities

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About