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Major issues

• I’d edit your background and conclusion to help the reader understand why the taxonomy is important for the scholarly communication ecosystem in order to motivate your suggestions in the beginning and drive home the impact at the end. I imagine there may be many readers who are tangentially familiar with conversations around peer review models, the NISO taxonomy, etc. but don’t see that rhetoric as integral to their own work in scholarly communication, so anything you can do to connect this to the bigger picture would be helpful for getting a wider audience to engage meaningfully with your work.

• A source of pushback to your paper would be exactly what you mention in the background: that the taxonomy was intended to cover many models of peer review in some level of detail but not every model in exhaustive detail. The taxonomy mentions that publishers should include more information as appropriate, so a response to your paper might be, “why does the taxonomy need to include these additional details if it’d only apply to a few unusual journals?” For that reason, it feels essential that you articulate why exactly the changes you suggest are key to include in the taxonomy and are not just oddities or minor comments without major impact on the usefulness of the taxonomy and its contribution to scholarly communication. To this end, I’d suggest adding a brief method section that describes your methodology for identifying journals that are not accurately described by the taxonomy and selecting the taxonomy criteria that represented a key gap versus oddities. Some analysis of how many journals would be impacted by your suggested changes or how they connect to broader trends in scholarly communication would also add some robustness to this potential rebuttal, though I’m not sure if the return on the time investment would be warranted or not. (That being said, perhaps there’s already analysis on this out there that you could use!)

Minor issues

• In the conclusion, when you say, “From the side of the editors, I would encourage them to go beyond the use of terminology and make their peer review policies and reviewers’ guidelines visible on their homepage, besides providing simple visual flows of their peer review process. Editors could even ask for feedback from their community about the accessibility of the information about the peer review process that they provide – is it too long? it is too short? Is it helpful? Is it easy to find on the journal’s website?,” I think this might be more pointed at publishers who own and control the webpages and that a common response would be that peer review policies and reviewer guidelines are already linked on journal homepages and that including those details on the homepage would make it cumbersome to navigate from a user experience perspective. Given that it’s a recommendation, I’d move it to the body with your other recommendations and articulate why linking to editorial policies and reviewer guidelines in a traditional manner is insufficient. As a side note, I love the idea here to essentially encourage editors to peer review their peer review policy and its presentation :-)

• I’d start off the background by describing what your paper is setting out to do before describing how the taxonomy came to be. The taxonomy’s genesis is useful for a reader unfamiliar with it but not core to your argument, so I’d just change the emphasis in your background so that the focus remains on the meat of your suggestions.

• Similarly, I think tightening up the structure of your argument and using the background, headings, and conclusion to more clearly walk the reader through it would make the paper more impactful. I know this is an expositional suggestion and am thus hesitant to comment it because of the risk of being pedantic, but I see it as something that could make a big difference in the reception and application of your comments.

• In the background, I’d revise “This STM Working Group was led by…and composed of members of the biggest publishing companies” to be more precise. I don’t think the working group members were necessarily from the biggest publishing companies by market share, employee count, revenue, etc. even though several were there, and describing it that way could imply to a less-informed reader that this was an initiative led by big commercial publishers and forced on the community or inadvertently leave out the contributions from smaller organizations that dedicated staff resources to working on the taxonomy. I don’t think you mean that (or that it’s a reflection of how the taxonomy was developed), so editing the language a little to be more specific would likely help!

In terms of potential journals for this work, I echo the suggestion of Learned Publishing—it feels to me like its readership is most in line with the audience you’re seeking. PLOS ONE and Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics may also be welcoming of this kind of comment, though if you’re looking for an outlet read by the publisher community, I don’t think those would give you the most visibility. If you’re not necessarily looking for a peer-reviewed journal to publish in but are rather looking for an outlet where you can maximize visibility, Science Editor could also be worth contacting as well—I know they take pitches! Finally, you may already have done this, but I think it would be worth sharing this with the NISO working group: I know several folks involved in STM working groups (including some folks I see listed in the the group that developed the Taxonomy), and it’s a very collaborative, open bunch, so they’d probably be keen to hear your feedback.

Competing interests

The author and I volunteer together with an industry organization and have collaborated in the past on a conference session; I was employed by an organization involved in the taxonomy's development and piloting during the time it was being piloted (though I was not personally involved).