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This white paper draws on expert interviews to explore the ways in which the concept of ‘corresponding authorship’ (CA) of publications has changed in recent years, starting from what was originally a set of discrete responsibilities in the peer review process. Insights from a new researcher survey reveals a lack of consensus across countries and disciplines about what the CA role really means, reflecting diverse incentives for authors to assume the CA role. Despite this, CA has become conflated with the notion of ‘leadership’ in multi-authored papers, a perception that has often gone unvalidated in scientometric studies with implications for evaluative practice.

This paper studies whether an increase in women's intrahousehold bargaining power causes couples to allocate more resources to their child's education, and, if so, what the underlying mechanisms for this might be. We conduct a between‐subject lab experiment with couples and vary the relative bargaining power between spouses. The paper provides two main insights. First, increasing the wife's bargaining power improves gender equality in allocation to children's education. However, it does not increase the amount invested in the child's education. Second, we show that the difference in time preferences between spouses matters for how much the household invests in the child's education. It benefits the child that the most patient spouse has more relative bargaining power. This implies that increasing the wife's bargaining power may reduce the allocation to the child's education if she is the less patient spouse. The results provide new insights into the current debate on female empowerment, and highlight the importance of incorporating a broader set of preferences in the analysis of intrahousehold decision‐making.

An authors' satisfaction is apparently influenced by the duration and quality of the scientific peer review process. In a research field, where multiple peer-reviewed journals offer the publication of articles and share a common scientific interest, an opportunity exists for them to cooperate in the often costly investment needed to maintain the peer review system. In a cooperative peer-review scenario, academic journals would share a submission management system, a reviewer database, a reviewer selection process, a recommended set of standards for reporting reviews, a review quality instrument, and a model for reviewer compensation. However, the final decision on what to publish in each journal would rest solely with the journal editor. This paper aims to apply peer review theory to the exploration of cooperative peer review. Thus, game theory is used to describe and model how peer review agents behave. A set of strategies for those agents is an equilibrium if each represents a best response to the other strategies. If all the players are playing the strategies in an equilibrium, they have no unilateral incentive to deviate, since their strategy is the best they can do given what others are doing. The equilibria of these games can predict how actual journals, authors and reviewers will behave when confronted with situations analogous to the peer-review game being studied. In particular, cooperation between peer-reviewed journals is more likely when each journal's prospective benefits outweigh that journal's prospective costs. Therefore, in this paper, we compare a Benchmark scenario of competition between journals and a cooperative scenario to further analyze the impact of incorporating cooperative peer review in the academic publishing process. We find that a cost-sharing scheme in cooperative peer review helps the academic journals offer a higher review quality than they would otherwise be able to achieve individually. A key insight from our results is that if a cost-sharing factor is properly specified, cooperative peer review can benefit the competing academic journals and help increase their profit levels, quality standards for accepting articles and review quality.

Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Granada/CBUA. This research was sponsored by the Spanish Board for Science, Technology, and Innovation under grant PID2021-122371NB-I00, and cofinanced with European FEDER funds., Given how hard it is to recruit good reviewers who are aligned with authors in their functions, journal editors could consider the use of better incentives, such as paying reviewers for their time. In order to facilitate a speedy turn-around when a rapid decision is required, the peer-reviewed journal can also offer a review model in which selected peer reviewers are compensated to deliver high-quality and timely peer-review reports. In this paper, we consider a peer-reviewed journal in which the manuscript’s evaluation consists of a necessary peer review component and an optional speedy peer review component. We model and study that journal under two different scenarios to be compared: a paid peer-reviewing scenario that is considered as the benchmark; and a hybrid peer-review scenario where the manuscript’s author can decide whether to pay or not. In the benchmark scenario of paid peer-reviewing, the scholarly journal expects all authors to pay for the peer review and charges separately for the necessary and the optional speedy peer-review components. Alternatively, in a hybrid peer-review scenario, the peer-reviewed journal gives the option to the authors to not pay for the necessary peer review if they are not able to pay. This will determine an altruistic amplification of pay utility. However, the no-pay authors cannot avail of the optional speedy peer review, which determines a restriction-induced no-pay utility reduction. In this paper, we find that under the hybrid setting of compensated peer review where the author can decide whether to pay or not, the optimal price and review quality of the optional speedy peer review are always higher than under the benchmark scenario of paid peer-reviewing, due to the altruistic amplification of pay utility. Our results show that when the advantage of adopting the hybrid mode of compensated peer review is higher due to the higher difference between the altruistic author utility amplification and the restriction-induced no-pay utility reduction, the journal can increase its profitability by increasing the price for the necessary peer review above that in the benchmark scenario of paid peer review. A key insight from our results is the journal’s capability to increase the number of paying authors by giving the option to the authors to not pay for the necessary peer review if they are not able to pay., Spanish Board for Science, Technology, and Innovation PID2021-122371NB-I00, European Commission, Universidad de Granada/CBUA

The peer review process typically has multiple evaluators. Too often editors rely on the Union Heuristic, which requires authors to perform all requested tests and extensions suggested by referees and editors, with results confirming the paper’s message. The Union Heuristic is easy, but has dysfunctional consequences—wasteful efforts on excessive empirical and theoretical robustness checks and extensions, slow publication times, bloated papers, and heavy use of referee time. We contrast this with the polar opposite (also not our recommendation), the Intersection Heuristic—requiring authors to perform only extensions requested by all evaluators. We propose that editors reset norms by making clear that as a matter of procedure, at editor discretion, excellent referee or coeditor suggestions will often not be mandated for authors. Instead, there should be a presumption of Up or Out (accept or reject typically one round of revisions or less) for submissions, with the extent of suggested changes held firmly in check. This will improve referee and author incentives, and streamline the publication process. It may also encourage authors to take the risks inherent in producing more innovative papers.

Innovation systems are sometimes referred to as complex systems, something that is intuitively understood but poorly defined. A complex system dynamically evolves in non-linear ways giving it unique properties that distinguish it from other systems. In particular, a common signature of complex systems is scale-invariant emergent properties. A scale-invariant property can be identified because it is solely described by a power law function, f(x) = kx^α, where the exponent, α, is a measure of scale-invariance. The focus of this paper is to describe and illustrate that innovation systems have properties of a complex adaptive system. In particular scale-invariant emergent properties indicative of their complex nature that can be quantified and used to inform public policy. The global research system is an example of an innovation system. Peer-reviewed publications containing knowledge are a characteristic output. Citations or references to these articles are an indirect measure of the impact the knowledge has on the research community. Peer-reviewed papers indexed in Scopus and in the Web of Science were used as data sources to produce measures of sizes and impact. These measures are used to illustrate how scale-invariant properties can be identified and quantified. It is demonstrated that the distribution of impact has a reasonable likelihood of being scale-invariant with scaling exponents that tended toward a value of less than 3.0 with the passage of time and decreasing group sizes. Scale-invariant correlations are shown between the evolution of impact and size with time and between field impact and sizes at points in time. The recursive or self-similar nature of scale-invariance suggests that any smaller innovation system within the global research system is likely to be complex with scale-invariant properties too. This record was migrated from the OpenDepot repository service in June, 2017 before shutting down.

This study reviews the existing literature on the US peer review system and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspection system to assess our knowledge of audit regulation. The traditional self-regulatory system of the accounting profession came to an end, in 2002, when the PCAOB was established to oversee the audit firms of publicly traded companies. This paper contributes to the controversial debate about self-regulation versus independent regulation by analysing, categorising, and comparing the research findings on the peer review system and the PCAOB system along three dimensions: the validity of peer reviews and PCAOB inspections, the recognition of reviews and inspections by decision-makers (e.g. investors, bankers, committees), and the effect of reviews and inspections on audit quality. Synthesising the research on the regulatory regimes suggests that the notion of external quality control, both through peer reviews and government inspections, is positively linked with an improvement of audit quality. At the same time, the analysis indicates that external users do not seem to recognise peer review and PCAOB reports as very useful instruments for decision-making, which is in line with an identified rather sceptical perception of the audit profession on reviews and inspections. Overall, this study reveals that although the academic literature on peer review and PCAOB inspection is extensive it has not produced definitive conclusions concerning various aspects of audit regulation. This paper shows how this blurred picture is due to conflicting research findings, the dominance of the quantitative research paradigm, and unchallenged assumptions within the literature, and concludes by proposing research opportunities for the future.

Open innovation and collaborative research including through international consortium institutions are generating important issues in life science fields. There are special difficulties in addressing the current science and technology issues by reinforcing the existing therapeutics and diagnostics development system. In case of cancer research, the tumor sample is limited, while predictability and validation of preclinical research require scientists to allocate additional attentions both to scientific research and operations. In this context, we discuss whether it is wise for the science community to treat positive paper retractions, such as those caused by scientific reproducibility issues the same as those caused by misconduct. It is possible that overly aggressive retractions of papers are removing important evidence from knowledge accumulation. Connectivity and recoupling are sources of knowledge creation that have a potential for generating new hypotheses, mechanisms and discoveries. In this paper, we focus on peer-reviewed science paper publications. We set up a research question exploring whether cancer research retractions are following the general pattern of peer reviewed paper retractions. A prior paper (Fang, et. al. 2012) showed that the majority of peer reviewed science paper retractions in the field of biomedical and life science were caused by misconduct. In contrast to them, we found several pieces of evidence that cancer and cancer biomarker research are not following the general trends. There are several authors who retracted their papers proactively because of reproducibility issues. Among them, several could have failed even if they followed the scientific methodology and practices with the best knowledge at the timings of their submissions. Treating such papers the same as retractions rooted in misconduct will lead to the removal of important scientific evidence from the field where knowledge networks and recoupling are crucial. On the side of scientific journals, several initiatives have started. For example, the Reproducibility Initiative makes it a rule to have models confirmed by other independent teams. At the same time, we propose for the science community to rethink the positive retraction issue and keep open the possibility that some papers with reproducibility issues might be rescued from hatchet-like retraction policies.

The goal of this paper is to provide a “non­‐technical” discussion of what the academic literatures in economics, marketing, and information systems can tell us about how piracy impacts sales of media products. Within these literatures, we have chosen to focus on empirical studies of the impact of piracy because, while there are a variety of analytic models proposing theories of how piracy might impact sales, we believe that the true test of these theories starts with data.Based on our review of the empirical literature we conclude that, while some papers in the literature find no evidence of harm, the vast majority of the literature (particularly the literature published in top peer reviewed journals) finds evidence that piracy harms media sales.

In this paper we present our unified peer-to-peer review model for Open Access preprint repositories. Its objective is to improve the efficiency and effectivity of digital scholarly communication. The key elements of this model are standardized quality assessment instruments, public and private communication channels, special rankings and novel incentives. The model allows scholars to proficiently evaluate both the manuscripts and their peer reviews. These scrutinized manuscripts and peer reviews will then be made available to the relevant parties. These standardized quality assessments allow for new quality metrics for papers and peer reviews. The Reviewer Impact, which represents the peer review proficiency and peer review output of scholars, is one such metric. The model includes diverse rankings for scholars to appear in to receive better odds of having their own manuscripts noticed, read, peer reviewed and cited. Their specific ranking is proportional to their Reviewer Impact and the overall quality of their manuscripts. The Open Access preprint repository model is a suitable foundation for our model because of its high degree of accessibility, but little to no certification of its deposited manuscripts. With this combination we envision a novel, Open Access, peer-to-peer scholarly communication model that functions independently of, but not incompatibly with, the traditional journal publishing model: Scholarly Communication 2.0.

As of the publication of this paper, 7 vaccines have gained full approval for their use against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. With 6 being in early or limited use and 23 still in Phase 3 trial. For a virus that became known only in December 2019, the published results have broadly exceeded expectations on the vaccine. We review the current state of published and peer reviewed results, consider a number of aspects focused on Psychiatry and review a number of key issues which are being actively discussed in the research community such as prioritisation of the vaccine in the population, vaccine schedules and non pharmaceutical interventions during the roll out of the vaccine.

The OECD’s Global Forum is set to publish the terms of reference for peer reviews on automatic exchange of information pursuant to the OECD’s Common Reporting Standard (CRS) in the near future. This paper anticipates those terms and proposes concrete elements that future peer review should contain for them to be effective in protecting the integrity of the CRS. Chief among these elements are specific statistics to ensure compliance, identify avoidance schemes and allow evaluation by independent and excluded parties (e.g. developing countries and civil society). We have written several reports identifying fundamental loopholes, gaps and biases in the CRS, and proposed fixes to them. However, we understand that neither the Global Forum nor the upcoming Terms of Reference for peer reviews can change or fix the CRS. For this reason, this report focuses only on recommendations for what peer reviews can do to ensure that the CRS, as it is, will be effectively implemented.

When properly implemented, Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) can achieve a high degree of internal validity. Yet, if an RCT is to inform policy interventions that extend beyond the experimental population, it is critical to establish external validity. In this paper, we first present a theoretical framework of external validity and identify the potential hazards that compromise generalizing results beyond the studied population, namely Hawthorne effects, general equilibrium effects, specific sample problems, and special care in the provision of the randomized treatment. Second, we reviewed all RCTs published in leading economic journals between 2009 and 2014 and scrutinized the way they deal with external validity. Based on a set of objective indicators, we find that many published RCTs do not discuss hazards to external validity and do not provide the information that is necessary to assess potential problems. Apparently, external validity is not an important matter of concern during the peer review process. To conclude, we call for a more systematic approach to report the results of RCTs, including external validity dimensions.

This study experimentally investigates gender quotas in light of peer review. We investigate competitions with and without gender quotas and a peer review process that allows for sabotage. Our findings show that the possibility of peer sabotage renders the gender quota ineffective in encouraging women to enter tournaments. Moreover, we provide evidence of a severe backlash against women, as they become targets of sabotage under gender quotas. Interestingly, this is the result of women focusing on sabotaging each other while men sabotage indiscriminately. Our results have implications for the use of quotas to mitigate the underrepresentation and underperformance of minority groups in environments in which peer sabotage is possible. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2772 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

This study reviews peer reviewed journal articles on microfinance impacts, sustainability, and outreach over the period 1997 to 2011. The review suggests mixed results on the impacts of microfinance worldwide, and fails to discover a concrete relationship between outreach and sustainability. However, the review confirms microfinance institutions extend financial and nonfinancial services to the bottom of the pyramid ignored by traditional financial institutions and considered un-bankable. The paper contributes to extant microfinance literature and guides inexperienced microfinance practitioners toward further academic research and publishing their work in relevant journals.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore the difference in entrepreneurial intentions, perceived entrepreneurial motivation, and cognitive profiles (attitudes towards entrepreneurship, perceived behaviour control, and subjective norms) between individuals who have participated in enterprise education programmes in the universities and those who have not. The paper also investigates the mediating role of attitudes towards entrepreneurship, perceived behaviour control, and subjective norms related to entrepreneurial motivation and the forming of entrepreneurial intentions.Design/methodology/approachSurvey information from 321 students from three universities in the Ukraine was hand collected. Hierarchical multiple regressions were used to test hypotheses.FindingsIndividuals who participate in enterprise programmes tend to have higher entrepreneurial motivation and are more likely to become entrepreneurs. Empirical evidence shows that attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behaviour control mediate the relationship between perceived entrepreneurial motivation and entrepreneurial intentions.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is based on data collected from three universities in one city. The implications for education managers related to the inclusion of enterprise courses into the study plans of engineering students are also discussed here.Practical implicationsThe findings have implications for the stimulation of student enterprise in transitional economies where attitudinal and resource (i.e. skill, competence and knowledge) deficiencies can retard enterprise. Entrepreneurial motivation is an important link between an intention and action. Enterprise education programs which stimulate entrepreneurial motivation should be offered to engineering students since many of them start ventures later. Engagement into enterprise development programs of engineering students might evoke earlier interest in self‐employment career path among young people.Originality/valueThe article contributes to the field of entrepreneurial motivation and intentions. The study extends insights from the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) (i.e. subjective norms, attitudes toward this behaviour, and perceived behavioural control) by also considering the perceived entrepreneurial motivation profiles of students.

Existing evidence on peer effects in a work environment stems from either laboratory experiments or from real-word studies referring to a specific firm or specific occupation. Yet, it is unclear to what extent these findings apply to the labor market in general. In this paper, therefore, we investigate peer effects in the workplace for a representative set of workers, firms, and occupations with a focus on peer effects in wages rather than productivity. Our estimation strategy—which links the average permanent productivity of workers’ peers to their wages— circumvents the reflection problem and accounts for the endogenous sorting of workers into peer groups and firms. On average, we find only small peer effects in wages. We also find small peer effects in the type of high skilled occupations which more closely resemble those used in studies on knowledge spillover. In the type of low skilled occupations analyzed in existing studies on social pressure, in contrast, we find larger peer effects, about half the size of those identified in similar studies on productivity.

The existing empirical literature on the peer review process in general and in accounting in particular has primarily focused on the fairness of the process and reasons for rejections of submitted papers. There is little evidence on the factors which might influence the overall timeliness of peer review. Based on a sample of hand-collected data from 477 articles published in The Accounting Review (TAR) between 1997 and 2009 I investigate the effect of informal feedback, article- and author-specific factors as well as fairness indicators on the duration of the peer review process. The results of my base model suggest that peer review in TAR is not object to external influence. Noticeably, articles which get highly cited after publication, pass the process significantly faster, indicating a certain effectiveness of the process. Collaboration between authors is a more important factor than informal feedback from colleagues, seminars, conferences, etc. In a second analysis I additionally investigate the effect of fairness indicators based on a subsample of articles for which the (accepting) editor is known. If institutional bonds between editor and author(s) exist, the time spent in peer review apparently decreases. This result should be interpreted with caution, as it could simply reflect a self-selection of high quality faculty. The results are robust to different definitions of author-specific attributes and the inclusion of submission year-, method- and topic-fixed effects.

Peer review lies at the core of current scientific research. It is composed of a set of social norms, practices and processes that connect the abstract scientific method with the society of people that apply the method. As a social construct, peer review should be understood by building theory-informed models and comparing them with data collection. Both these activities are evolving in the era of automated computation and communication: new modeling tools and large bodies of data become available to the interested researcher. In this paper, starting from abstract principles, we develop and present a model of the peer review process. We also propose a working implementation of a subset of the general model, developed with Jason, a language that implements the BDI architecture for multi agent systems. After running a set of simulations, varying the initial distribution of reviewer skill, we compare the aggregates that our simplified model produces with recent findings, showing how the model can generate data with comparable statistical signatures. We conclude with a list of research questions that could be addressed in future work.

This is the authors’ accepted and refereed manuscript to the article also published at www.ssrn.com This paper investigates whether Euro-zone equity returns are driven by country or industry effects over the 1990 to 2008 period. Using a style analysis approach, we find that before the introduction of the Euro country effects dominate, while industry effects prevail after 1999. This reversal at the aggregate level is driven mainly by countries that were least integrated in the EMU and world markets prior to the Euro launch. For markets with stronger economic linkages, such as Germany and France, industry effects dominate both in the nine years before and in the nine years after the introduction of the Euro.

Can a student whose editing eye is driven by anxious self-checking, overwhelmed by the concern for whether another student treated an identical issue the same or differently than he has, really provide valid feedback on whether the student author has met the intended audience’s needs? This working paper suggests that, despite its pitfalls, peer evaluation in the legal writing classroom can be designed to achieve the best goals of the peer-editing exercise while at the same time reduce the anxiety and free students to more fully discover audience. One design that has the potential to create a safer, more authentic environment for peer evaluation is one in which students work on different problems. This would remove some of the competitive social comparison inherent in a peer editing exercise where students are all working to reach the same “answer.”

This paper analyzes the impact of online customer reviews on purchasing decisions and the influence of online customer or peer reviews compared to other channels of information such as offline press (expert reviews) and trial versions (personal reviews). Using 7,024 answers of an anonymous online survey administrated from June 18 to July 5, 2004, on one of the leading websites dedicated to video games in France, we show that i. online peer reviews gathered by consumers before purchasing video games positively influence purchasing decisions; ii. the effect of online peer reviews is as important as the effects of personal and expert reviews; iii. online customer reviews complement trial versions and expert reviews from magazines.

An anonymous survey of university accounting faculty was conducted to assess current perceptions of the peer review process in accounting journals. The responses revealed that (a) most respondents are fairly positive about the peer review process, especially the process being fair/unbiased and improving the quality of research; (b) the most serious perceived threats to review process integrity involve reviewer misconduct (e.g., delaying reviews for self-interest or rejecting papers for revenge); (c) editors allowing excessive delays in the process and institutional favoritism by editors are seen as the most prevalent issues; (d) editors/associate editors of high-level or top-tier journals are most positive about the review process, while assistant professors, those at doctoral-granting institutions, and those submitting to top-tier journals are least positive; and (e) respondents’ suggestions for improving the review process emphasize improving timeliness, reducing favoritism, and reconsidering the notion of blind reviews (some consider blind reviews to be impossible, but others want to ensure that reviews are blind). Based on the results and other sources, we offer a proposed starting point for a peer review code of conduct for accounting journals.

This paper examines whether peer review conducted under the AICPA's self-regulatory regime has been effective at signaling audit quality. In spite of the long-standing debate about self-regulated peer review in the auditing profession, there is a surprising lack of research evidence as to whether such reviews are effective at signaling or improving audit quality. Prior research has examined whether the information contained in peer-review reports is associated with perceived audit quality (Hilary and Lennox 2005). We examine whether the information contained in peer-review reports is associated with actual audit quality. Our results suggest that self-regulated peer review does appear to provide effective signals regarding audit-firm quality. Specifically, we find that the number of weaknesses identified in peer-review reports is associated with other potential indicators of weak quality control or risky practices within accounting firms such as selling tax shelters, overworking staff, and taking on risky clients—even after controlling for changes in the peer-review environment over time. We also find that the number of weaknesses identified in peer-review reports is useful in predicting audit failure (i.e., malpractice claims alleging auditor negligence), and that certain types of peer-review findings (engagement-performance weaknesses, personnel-management weaknesses) are particularly useful in this regard.

Peer review procedures provide a mechanism for incorporating employee involvement into nonunion dispute resolution procedures in the workplace. Under peer review procedures, fellow employees who are peers of the grievant sit on a panel that hears and decides the employee's grievance. The intended effect is to increase employee trust in and use of dispute resolution procedures by providing a final decision-maker that is viewed as more independent of management and more favorable to the employee perspective in disputes. From a legal perspective peer review procedures are useful because they can be structured to avoid violating the limitations on nonunion employee representation plans contained in section 8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations Act. This paper investigates the implications for organizations of adoption of peer review procedures. Case study and survey evidence provides support for the effect of peer review on increasing employee use of dispute resolution procedures. In a survey of 203 establishments in the telecommunications industry, employees were over twice as likely to appeal disciplinary decisions through nonunion dispute resolution procedures where those procedures included peer review, though the rate of usage of peer review procedures was under half that for grievance-arbitration procedures in unionized establishments. Both case study and survey evidence also supports a linkage between peer review and the use of self-managed teams in the workplace. The average percentage of workers organized into self-managed teams was over twice as high in establishments with peer review as in either other nonunion establishments or unionized establishments.