Doc Maps: Charting research-object evaluation metadata
Editorial processes applied to manuscripts, such as peer review and ethics checks, are highly heterogeneous across publishers and platforms. They will only become more so as scholarly publishing is disrupted by new innovations, the open science movement, and the removal of barriers to entry.
Initiatives to model peer review practices have emerged - I myself have been involved with the TRANSPOSE project to gather journal practices in open peer review, preprinting, and co-reviewing. Other recent initiatives include Peer Review Transparency, Review Maps, and an STM Association working group on review taxonomies. But these initiatives tend to focus on the needs of their creators, and not the needs of readers, funders, and the scholarly publishing ecosystem as a whole.
I have started working with the Knowledge Futures Group as a project manager for the Doc Maps project, which is working to develop a community-endorsed machine-readable, extensible, and discoverable framework for representing and surfacing object-level review and editorial events.
The current first phase of the project that I am working on involves:
identifying different potential models and providers of object-level editorial events relevant to the biology community (including multiple models currently in development);
developing the Doc Maps specification to meet the needs of those efforts;
working with key stakeholders to produce technical guides for implementing Doc Maps in their current or planned systems/frameworks; and
laying out a technical roadmap for a future aggregation service and browser extension.
Ultimately, the goal of the project is to ensure that object-level editorial metadata models in development are compatible with a broad range of possible futures for scholarly publishing, rather than locking in the current system.
You can read more about the project - and get involved - here at the Knowledge Futures Group.