The Distributed Peer Review Experiment

Author(s)
F. Patat, W. Kerzendorf, D. Bordelon, G. Van de Ven, T. Pritchard
Abstract

All large, ground- and space-based astronomical facilities serving wide communities face a similar problem: in many cases the number of applications they receive in response to each call exceeds 1000. This poses a serious challenge to running an effective selection process under the classic peer-review paradigm, in which the proposals are assigned to pre-allocated panels with fixed compositions. Although, in principle, one could increase the size of the time allocation committee, this creates logistic and financial problems which place a practical limit on its maximum size, making this solution unviable beyond a certain volume of applications. For this reason, alternative solutions must be sought. One of these is the so-called Distributed Peer Review (DPR) in which, by submitting a proposal, the Principal Investigators (PIs) agree both to act as reviewers and to have their proposal reviewed by their peers. In this article we report the results of a DPR experiment run by ESO in Period 103, in parallel with the regular review by the Observing Programmes Committee (OPC).

Organisation(s)
Department of Astrophysics
External organisation(s)
Michigan State University, European Southern Observatory (Germany), New York University
Journal
The Messenger
Volume
177
Pages
3-13
ISSN
0722-6691
DOI
https://doi.org/10.18727/0722-6691/5147
Publication date
09-2019
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
103003 Astronomy, 103004 Astrophysics
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/718cfedd-75ac-458e-98ef-0114de0cff51