News from animal – open space

The winds of change are blowing! When animal – open space was launched in June 2021, one of the aims was to propose an alternative to the standard external peer review of manuscripts. We believe that external peer review contributes to but is not a guarantee of the quality of a scientific paper. We see this nowadays with papers being published by journals after a peer review of doubtful quality. Open Science thus puts a greater responsibility on the shoulders of readers. Up to now, manuscripts in animal – open space were reviewed by scientific editors of the journal who meticulously evaluate the content of the manuscripts, focusing on the reproducibility of the study and the associated data. In accordance to the philosophy of Open Science, the journal set up a post-publication, open commenting process that allows readers to interact with authors through the
PUBPEER platform via a link called “DISCUSS THE ARTICLE”. The intention was to encourage an open discussion about the published article and replace the “hidden” reviews done by a couple of peers.
Unfortunately, this reader-author interaction has not been widely used. Is the scientific community not ready yet to engage in such an open discussion? Are we too early with this approach? This remains unclear. Nevertheless, in addition to the peer-review, the goal remains to foster an open dialogue between readers and authors regarding the published article.