Evaluating the Quality of Open Access Content

Our community has worked hard to make a growing number of resources open, from journal articles, to textbooks, to datasets. While this has resulted in a robust body of open content, one question that commonly arises is “How do I determine the quality of this content?”New strategies for assessing the quality of open content are emerging from different quarters. These strategies range from new methods of peer review, such as open peer-review or post publication peer-review; new methods of measuring impact, such as alternative metrics; and new forms of annotation, such as data set annotation and open comments on publications.

This forum explored the challenges and opportunities of evaluating open content, across disciplines and across resources types, while identifying promising pathways to identify and use quality open content.