Peer Review (event summary)

Thursday, 11 June, 2015

I was recently on a panel discussion organised by Sense About Science on peer review specifically targeted at PhD and early career researchers. This series has been running 4 or 5 years now and has slowly evolved over time in to its current format of 2 group discussion sessions followed by brief panel member presentations and then a long Q&A (a good review of the event by my PhD student James O’Connor). Elizabeth Moylan of BioMed Central spoke about how the system currently operates commenting upon single/double blind and open review, the cycle of review, potential biases and the problem of reviewer fatigue. This is particularly a problem where journals seek fast review times and if papers get cycled between different journals. She noted new developments that uncouple review from the journal (Peerage of Science and Axios Review), as well as ideas for collaborative review and receiving credit for review. All important discussions and developments in the peer review process.

I spoke next (see my slides) covering why people choose to publish before moving on to the process (and emotions!) of submitting a paper, receiving a review and (hopefully) seeing it in print before concluding on why people review.

Irene Hames spoke on some of the developments in peer review and how we can and should be making the most of these. They included (in no particular order) retraction watch, PubPeer, PeerJ, Faculty1000 and Rubriq. She also highlighted how journals are now competing for peer reviews and that this is an area ripe for credit (dont forget to get your ORCID ID and list them there) as well as abuse!! See this story over at Retraction Watch for example. She also briefly talked about what you can do with a review - this is actually a piece of work by the reviewer and being able to use these reviews is potentially a valuable output. Check with the journal!

The discussion was really thought provoking and highlighted, first and foremost, the strong biomedical interest in the attendees. Questions relating to supervisors taking credit for reviews students had undertaken, unhelpful reviews, rude reviews, why rejections happen, how reviewers are selected, differences between subjects, journal funding models…. all really pertinent topics. It’s also worth noting that authors compete for space where journals have page budgets - so whilst a paper may well be publishable, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be accepted. And that writing well goes a long way to helping a paper along in the review process - you can never practice enough at writing!!

A hugely valuable day and well worth being a part of the debate.

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