Following Peer Review Week 2020, this topic feels appropriate to the current scholarly publishing environment. The Scholarly Kitchen brought this topic to our attention in their article, “Guest Post — On Clarifying the Goals of a Peer Review Taxonomy.”
The practice of peer review is changing, for many reasons. Recently, the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), the academic publishing association that represents academic societies, commercial publishers, and scholarly publishing organizations, made an effort to categorize these models.
This comes after much pressure on policymakers and the public at large who have pressing needs for new scientific evidence to support timely decisions.
Add to that is the pressure from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has dramatically upped the urgency on scientists and scholarly publishers to produce and communicate emerging research even as budgets rapidly constrict.
The review processes employed across and within these venues varies substantially, for example in terms of who conducts the review, the time elapsed, what text and materials are reviewed, and the criteria employed. It seems like a taxonomy is in order to create consistency, clarification, and improve findability.
Professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI-compliant.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
