Opening up the peer review process: Evaluation and alignment in research paper trajectories

Many science journals have begun either to provide authors with the opportunity to publish peer review reports alongside their published article or to use a form of interactive open access peer review, which means that the review process is made public from the start. However, because of the traditionally occluded nature of peer reviewing, much applied linguistic research on the topic has focused on corpora of individual reviews rather than the negotiation process between the author(s), reviewers, and editors that peer reviewing essentially entails. In this paper, the focus is on this negotiation process. The data are drawn from an open access journal in geosciences. They consist of review histories of three research papers with clusters of peer review reports, short comments, author replies, and editor decision letters. These clusters have been analysed chronologically in relation to one another, considering their impact and the evaluating authorities evoked in the process. The findings show that the brokers paid attention to both study- and text-related aspects in their evaluations, thus highlighting brokering as an activity related to both knowledge and text. Reviewer authority was recognised by the authors and editors alike, but the authors were also found to negotiate their divergent positions.