Not only the peer review issue is one of the two most acknowledged problems along with the business model, but it is also the easier to understand for a general audience. We made a study involving newspapers as they represent the link between the academic world (found in the articles' authors) and the non academics (found in the audience), and we looked for the most discussed concepts.
First we chose to use LexisNexis, a pretty handy online tool which lets you research into different newspapers archives for a specific query. It was also useful for choosing which newspapers to analyse as we selected the first english written ones. In particular, we searched for "open access peer review" into The Guardian, Chronicle, The New York Times, The Australian, The Independent and The Times repositories. Then, with the help of Kimono (another useful web tool indexing articles' metadata), we registered authors along with their professional field, date of publication and the category it was published into. They were then divided into positive, negative, neutral and unkown position towards the peer review debate thanks to a semantic analysis. The negative ones were studied deeplier and divided into more sub-categories representing the reason why they were against: "not working", "financial reasons", "other methods suggested".
The first map is a timeline going from 2004 until 2015 representing the number of articles per year per newspaper. Vertically there are the newspapers and horizontally the time progression, while each square represents an article and its colour tells us whether said article was positive (blue), neutral (gray), negative (red) or unknown (N/A, orange). By pressing the "negative" button it is possible to highlight only the critic articles and see the reason why they were negative.
From the second visualisation you can picture the working field of the articles' authors and their respective opinion over OA's peer review.
The third chart goes deeper into negative opinions, where bubbles represent the kinds of peer review problems pointed out and how influent they are in percentage over the total negative articles.
First, often authors are not much concerned about informing about peer review problems: over 12 years, these six newspapers published only 170 articles, with The Guardian taking almost half of them with 80.
Frequently authors are not just journalists but experts like chemists, physicists, biologists etc. and some of them are very active on newspapers. Even though one author might be less likely to write an article just to support a working model already in use, it is notable that the vast majority of them recognises problems in it. Despite this, only some of them actually suggest new review methods, while most of them simply highlight negative aspects of it.
