Emerging new methods of peer review in scholarly journals

The long-established peer-review practices in scholarly journals have remained largely unchanged by the introduction of the Internet. Nevertheless, critique of the shortcomings of current practices (bias, slowness, etc.) have led to many publishers and journals experimenting with novel ways of performing and organizing peer review, enabled by e-publishing and new revenue models. This article proposes a taxonomy of such innovations and discusses a number of cases where, for instance, the assignment of reviewers is handled differently from current best practice. New models, which seem particularly attractive to manuscript authors, are acceptance of any scientifically valid articles as practiced in 'megajournals'. and increased transparency about how the peer-review process in a particular journal works.