With the upraising of the Open Access movement it was discussed heavily in the literature what an academic journal is and what not. The most widely accepted definition was created around the term predatory journal. The term was invented to make clear what the difference is between a serious peer reviewed journal and a joke-non peer reviewed journal.
The term predatory journal is widely accepted not because the definition is correct, but it was used in many thousands papers by OpenAccess experts. The term predatory journal is equal to a low cost journal. What predatory publishing has in common is, that the Article processing charge is lower. The typical predatory journal is published online-only, has a reduced fee of 100 US$ per paper and no peer review takes place. This definition was over a long time span an ideal definition to sort the existing journals into two groups. But it fails to explain what a peer review is.
A more elaborated definition divides academic journals into two groups: peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed. The problem is, that it's much harder to define the peer review process. Even Wikipedia has no clear understanding what peer review is about. The working hypothesis is, that peer review is realized with a stable branch in which a frozen upstream gets evaluated.
Freezing the upstream is something which is more complicated than a normal preprint server. A preprint server is location in which authors are submitting their journals. For example Arxiv is a preprint server, but Academia.edu and a github folder too. What all preprint server have in common is that no peer review takes place. Somebody uploads a document and the reader doesn't know if the document has high or a low quality.
A naive assumption is, that a preprint is transformed into a journal by peer reviewing the preprint. That means, somebody sends the manuscript to an expert and the expert gives a quality judgment. This understanding describes only the surface. What is missing is the reason why somebody should peer review a paper. A typical assumption from the past was, that peer review is equal to paid peer review. All the existing academic journals are working with money in the loop. So the assumption is, that a serious journal is equal to a high price journal.
The surprising information is, that this definition describes also not the complete picture. It's possible to combine high quality peer review with a non-commercial journal. The important underlaying process has to do with freezing the upstream. Freezing is a term used by Open Source advocates which are using the git version control system. A freeze is equal to create a branch. On the command line it's done with a simple “git branch stable” This creates a new branch, called stable, and in this branch a snapshot of the master branch is created. A freeze is equal to a point copy of the existing files.
Let me give an example. Suppose an author has uploaded a HTML document to a preprint server. The HTML document contains a 8 page long paper which consists of 20 bibliographic references at the end. Now, somebody else creates a copy of the document. He is freezing the upstream document. The result is, that both documents, original.html and copy.html can be edited independent from each other. The files are located in different folders. The ability to edit a document independently is producing a version conflict. To overcome the version conflict some sort of communication is required.
The communication actions to overcome a version conflict are equal to the peer review process of an academic journal. There are different options in doing so:
- dedicated peer review by external experts
- decision making by the journal editor
- negotiating on a mailing list
- overwrite the version by technical actions because user1 has admin rights, while user2 not
A dedicated peer review is only one option to solve a version conflict in a two branch project. The peer review process isn't at the beginning but it's an answer to a version conflict. The underlying reason is the out of sync behavior of two branches which holds the same file. Branch1 is maintained by the upstream in the preprint server, while branch2 is maintained by the journal in the downstream. Let us investigate what a potential alternative to an upstream freeze is.
Suppose the idea is not to create a stable branch but contribute to the original.html file in a different fashion. The workflow would work in the following way. At first, the author uploads the original.html file to a preprint server. Now a second user likes the article but he would like to add something. He sends an e-mail to the author with an additional paragraph. The original author accepts the modification and a new file is uploaded to the preprint server which is origina-improved.html.
That means, the modification in the file are taken place in a single branch. The original author plus user2 are communicating back and forth and if they have found a shared position, the file gets updated. Conflicts are not possible, because if the original author doesn't accept a modification the user has no option to modify the file.
The major difference between a single branch development model and a two branch model is, that in the two branch model a conflict is the possible. This conflict produces a certain communication style. Perhaps it make sense to provide an example. In the normal single branch model. the original author owns the file and the second user is a subordinate. In a two branch model the second user owns the stable branch and the original author is a subordinate. This kind of flipped social relationship is available for all peer reviewed journals. The original authors sends a manuscript to a peer reviewed serious journal only for the reason to become the subordinate of the journal editor. Not the author but the journal decides if the submission has a high quality. The advantage of this flipped role model is, that the reader of the journal has an advantage from it. The reader trust a journal if not the authors but the journal editor take the decisions.