Search

Peer review goes back to at least 1665 with the founding of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. However peer review did not become well established until the middle of the last century. For example, Einstein's 1905 papers in Annalen der Physik were not subjected to a peer review process. The purpose for which peer review was established is not clear. The probable motives include a combination of rationing of (then) very expensive journal pages, catching obvious errors, and at least some degree of quality control on what is published. The question now is "Do past models make sense in the world of the Internet?", as today, on-line published pages are essentially free and continuous on-line review and rebuttal is practical.

Each year it is the privilege and responsibility of the Editor-in-Chief to acknowledge the reviewers whose largely anonymous efforts lie at the heart of any scientific publication, and the communities of scholars and practitioners whom it serves. As such, it is worth taking a few minutes to reflect on the purpose of the peer review process, and the contributions our reviewers make. To my mind the principal purposes of peer review are to determine whether the paper merits publication, and to help authors write better papers.

I wish to extend my deep appreciation to all those who have so generously volunteered their time and talents during 2015 to the peer review and publication of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting . Special thanks go to our BTS Publications Chair and Associate Editors who have shared their valuable time and broadcast engineering expertise in managing a steadily increasing flow of papers and evaluating manuscripts through the peer review process.

Over the last 15 years, the Internet has enabled new modes of authorship, new forms of open licensing and distribution, and new forms of collaboration and peer production to flourish. But in turn, new anxieties have arisen, especially concerning quality assurance, peer review, reuse, and modification. New innovations are appearing in peer review, endorsement, the measurement of trust, and the understanding of reputation, but without any systematic analysis of the general principles of quality assurance and peer review in this new era. In this paper, we propose a general set of principles for understanding what peer review was in the past and how it should be applied today to different kinds of content and in new platforms for managing quality. The principles stress an analysis not only on the content in materials but also on their context of use. Our focus is on open educational resources, and we present a case study of the open education project Connexions' lens system for quality assurance and review. However, the principles can be applied across multiple levels of knowledge production, including scholarship in engineering and science and reference materials in addition to educational publishing.

This study describes an effective web-based learning strategy, peer review, used by 143 computer science undergraduate students in an operating systems class at a Taiwanese university. Peer review, based on social constructivism, can be easily implemented via the authors' well-developed web-based peer review (WPR) system. Through peer review, the authors hope to form an authentic learning environment similar to an academic society in which a researcher submits a paper to a journal and receives reviews from society members before publication. Students using this learning strategy are expected to develop higher level thinking skills. The WPR system functioned in the following roles in this study: (1) an information distribution channel and management center for assignment submissions and peer review; (2) a forum for peer interaction and knowledge construction; and (3) storage for knowledge construction procedures. An evaluation of learning effects and students' perceptions about peer review during the spring of 1998 revealed that students not only performed better under peer review, but also displayed higher level thinking skills, i.e., critical thinking, planning, monitoring, and regulation. Students perceived peer review as an effective strategy that promoted their learning motivation. However, merely being an effective reviewer or an effective author may not excel in a peer review environment. The most effective individual appears to be the strategic adapter who effectively constructs a project, adjusts to peers' comments, and serves as a critical reviewer as well.