OpenUP - A specification of the scientific method and scientific communication

This deliverable aims at shedding some light on scientific peer review in the era of digital science, which in our view goes beyond reviewing scholarly literature. In the Digital Era not only the final outcome of the research process, i.e. the scientific publication, but potentially also other research products generated at other stages of the research workflow can be subject to review by peers. The adoption of ICT technologies in support of science introduces unprecedented benefits, which can be mainly identified in: (i) the ability of sharing an online "digital laboratory", i.e. tools, applications, services used to perform science, and (ii) the ability of sharing research products used as input or produced in the context of a digital laboratory. An example of (i) may be RStudio, a desktop tool to run R scripts, made available for download from some Web repository, while an example of (ii) may be the specific R script created by a scientist as result of his/her research activity, made available to other researchers through the digital laboratory. Accordingly, scientists can not only publish literature describing their findings but also share the entities they used and that are required to repeat and reproduce science. Such innovative shift also sets the condition for novel peer review methodologies, as well as scientific reward policies, where scientific results can be transparently and objectively assessed via machine-assisted processes. In this deliverable we describe our vision of "research flow peer review" as a urgent and demanded practice, identifying related challenges, current solutions, and proposing future directions.