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The study aims to provide an analytical overview of current innovations in peer review and their potential impacts on scholarly communication.

The authors created a survey that was disseminated among publishers, academic journal editors and other organizations in the scholarly communication ecosystem, resulting in a data set of 95 self-defined innovations. The authors ordered the material using a taxonomy that compares innovation projects according to five dimensions. For example, what is the object of review? How are reviewers recruited, and does the innovation entail specific review foci?

Peer review innovations partly pull in mutually opposed directions. Several initiatives aim to make peer review more efficient and less costly, while other initiatives aim to promote its rigor, which is likely to increase costs; innovations based on a singular notion of “good scientific practice” are at odds with more pluralistic understandings of scientific quality; and the idea of transparency in peer review is the antithesis to the notion that objectivity requires anonymization. These fault lines suggest a need for better coordination.

This paper presents original data that were analyzed using a novel, inductively developed, taxonomy. Contrary to earlier research, the authors do not attempt to gauge the extent to which peer review innovations increase the “reliability” or “quality” of reviews (as defined according to often implicit normative criteria), nor are they trying to measure the uptake of innovations in the routines of academic journals. Instead, they focus on peer review innovation activities as a distinct object of analysis.

Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) represent an increasingly important part of the scholarly communication landscape. OAMJs, such as PLOS ONE, are large scale, broad scope journals that operate an open access business model (normally based on article-processing charges), and which employ a novel form of peer review, focussing on scientific “soundness” and eschewing judgement of novelty or importance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses relating to OAMJs, and their place within scholarly publishing, and considers attitudes towards mega-journals within the academic community.

This paper presents a review of the literature of OAMJs structured around four defining characteristics: scale, disciplinary scope, peer review policy, and economic model. The existing scholarly literature was augmented by searches of more informal outputs, such as blogs and e-mail discussion lists, to capture the debate in its entirety.

While the academic literature relating specifically to OAMJs is relatively sparse, discussion in other fora is detailed and animated, with debates ranging from the sustainability and ethics of the mega-journal model, to the impact of soundness-only peer review on article quality and discoverability, and the potential for OAMJs to represent a paradigm-shifting development in scholarly publishing.

This paper represents the first comprehensive review of the mega-journal phenomenon, drawing not only on the published academic literature, but also grey, professional and informal sources. The paper advances a number of ways in which the role of OAMJs in the scholarly communication environment can be conceptualised.

Due to product diversity, traditional quality signals in the hotel industry such as star ratings and brand affiliation do not work well in the accommodation booking process on the sharing economy platform. From a suppliers’ perspective, this study aims to apply the signaling theory to the booking of Airbnb listings and explore the influence of quality signals on the odds of an Airbnb listing being booked.

A binomial logistic model is used to describe the influences of different attributes on the market demand. Because of the large sample size, sequential Bayesian updating method is utilized in hospitality and tourism field for the first attempt.

Results show that, in addition to host-specific information such as “Superhost” and identity verification, attributes including price, extra charges, region competitiveness and house rules are all effective signals in Airbnb. The signaling impact is more effective for the listings without any review comments.

This study contributes to the literature by incorporating the signaling theory in the analysis of booking probability of Airbnb accommodation. The research findings are valuable to hosts in improving their booking rates and revenue. In addition, government and industrial management organizations can have more efficient strategy and policy planning.

Historic architecture is one of the most prevalent human-made attractions and image attributes that the tourism industry substantially benefits from. Moreover, this attraction creates a critical value in augmenting destination competitiveness. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to discuss historic architecture in relation to guest experience and to find out if historic buildings used as hotels are, physically, elements of attraction. The findings reveal that historic buildings used as hotels have a specific potential in attracting guests, and these buildings are mainly considered positive by guests. Hotel guests are satisfied by the physical – i.e., architectural and atmospheric – features of hotels serving in historic buildings. This paper will help readers rethink how historic architecture plays a key role in tourism consumption. The paper uniquely seeks to delve into the potential of historic hotel buildings as elements of attraction by examining over 9.8 thousand comments of hotel guests.

Few studies to date have explored factors contributing to the dining experience from a visitor’s perspective. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether different restaurant attributes are critical in evaluating the restaurant experience in online reviews for visitors (non-local) and local guests.

In all, 100,831 online restaurant reviews retrieved from TripAdvisor are analyzed by using domain-specific aspect-based sentiment detection. The influence of different restaurant features on the overall evaluation of visitors and locals is determined and the most critical factors are identified by the frequency of their online discussion.

There are significant differences between locals and visitors regarding the impact of busyness, payment options, atmosphere and location on the overall star rating. Furthermore, the valence of the factors drinks, facilities, food, busyness and menu found in the reviews also differs significantly between the two types of guests.

The findings of this study help restaurant managers to better understand the different customer needs. Based on the results, they can better decide which restaurant aspects should receive the most attention to ensure that customers are satisfied.

Research on online reviews has largely neglected the role of different visitation motives. This study assumes that the reviews of local and non-local restaurant visitors are based on different factors and separates them to gain a more fine-grained and realistic picture of the relevant factors for each particular group.

The research and practice agree that social media are reshaping strategy and organization rules across industries. Nevertheless, how social media can become a source of competitive advantage remains under-investigated and there is no evidence about which capabilities and competencies can effectively and strategically exploit social media. By merging the literature on social media management and hospitality, the authors develop and test a theoretical framework that identifies the most relevant capabilities and competencies for using social media in the food service sector. The paper aims to map them and understand which ones are relevant according to different strategic choices of social media use.

The authors adopted a qualitative methodology using semi-structured interviews to managers or owners of 14 restaurants in a big city in Northern Italy.

The theoretical framework suggests that social media could be strategically used for different aims by relying on specific capabilities and competencies. The authors tested it and found that, though nowadays restaurant managers mainly focus on a narrow set of social media competencies linked to relational and marketing capabilities, some also rely on social media to promote organizational change and innovation.

The authors propose a theoretical framework and preliminary evidence on capabilities and competencies declined for the food service sector. The model considers different uses of social media and related capabilities and competencies by mapping them accordingly to their strategic use. The authors preliminarily validate our framework and highlight the competencies possessed by the restaurant managers of our sample and their alignment with the strategic use of social media.