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Journals that adopt open peer review (OPR), where review reports of published articles are publicly available, provide an opportunity to study both review content characteristics and quantitative aspects of the overall review process. This study investigates two areas relevant to the quality assessment of manuscript reviews. First, do journal policies for reviewers to identify themselves influence how reviewers evaluate the merits of a manuscript based on the relative frequency of hedging terms and research-related terms appearing in their reviews? Second, is there an association between the number of reviews/reviewers and the manuscript's research impact once published as measured by citations? We selected reviews for articles published in 17 OPR journals from 2017 to 2018 to examine the incidence of reviewers' uses of hedging terms and research-related terms. The results suggest that there was little difference in the relative use of hedging term usage regardless of whether reviewers were required to identify themselves or if this was optional, indicating that the use of hedging in review contents was not influenced by journal requirements for reviewers to identify themselves. There was a larger difference observed for research-related terminology. We compared the total number of reviews for a manuscript, rounds of revisions, and the number of reviewers with the number of Web of Science citations the article received since publication. The findings reveal that scrutiny by more reviewers or conducting more reviews or rounds of review do not result in more impactful papers for most of the journals studied. Implications for peer review practice are discussed.

This report discusses the Overcoming Barriers to Information Access (B2A) program. This is a doctoral cohort program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The program has focused on educating the next generation of doctoral graduates in library and information science with an emphasis on the theme of overcoming barriers to information access. Fellows were provided resources to support their educational activities, research and instructional experiences. In this paper the principal investigator for the program and the B2A Fellows reflect on the challenges and the rewards of their experiences in the program. Key findings that emerged include the importance of building community throughout the program and exposure to diverse perspectives. This initiative shows that although funding packages provide important resources to students, they do not buy extra time. The reflections in this paper provide insights into the doctoral student experience that can benefit other library and information science doctoral programs.

This article aims to contribute to the discussion on authorship in contemporary science from Foucauldian and Kuhnian perspectives, highlighting the social aspects of science and the role of authorship in scientific revolutions. Thus, it describes the functions of the 'author' discussed by Foucault that can assist to reveal the characteristics of the scientific practice and examples of how theories are materialized. As a result, it identifies the ways in which modern science is developed and how knowledge is construed by multiple authors, group authors, the merit that is attributed by citations, etc. This article highlights the complexity of authorship attribution and the need to rethink generalized bibliometric techniques to evaluate science considering other aspects that go beyond the mere listing of the authors.

To understand how authors and reviewers are accepting and embracing Open Peer Review (OPR), one of the newest innovations in the Open Science movement.