Peer Review Week 2019: Quality in Peer Review
Peer Review Week is celebrating its 5th anniversary this week from September 16-20, 2019. This international event stemmed from a conversation between Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) back in 2015 and has continued to gain momentum with each passing year. Peer Review Week 2019 delves into the theme of “quality in peer review.”
Peer Review Week’s global reach can be found in live and virtual events, webinars, interviews, social media activities, and more. The purpose of these events is to demonstrate how the peer review process encourages and maintains scientific equality. This annual event brings together individuals, institutions, communities, and organizations with one unified goal: to promote the critical nature of the peer review process in scholarly communications.
Why Peer Review Week?
Peer Review Week’s official website talks about why the annual event is important:
- The peer review process remains a current practice
- To emphasize the central role peer review plays is scholarly communication
- To showcase the work of editors and reviewers
- To share research and advance best practices
- To highlight the latest innovation and applications
Peer Review Week 2019 Resources
- Peer Review Week is Five! talks about the history, outcomes, and milestones from previous Peer Review Weeks.
- Peer Review Week YouTube Channel features researchers, publishers and anyone with views on quality in peer review, from a range of voices around the world, covering established and emerging research areas, different experiences, and subject area backgrounds.
- The Benefits of Peer Review: Q&A with Veterinary Evidence Authors (9/16/19) asked three published authors to provide their overview and insights on what it’s like to go through the peer review process.
- Factors Affecting Journal Submission Numbers: Impact Factor and Peer Review Reputation discusses how an increased Impact Factor correlates to increased submissions whereas a decreased Impact Factor correlates to decreased submissions, how a negative peer review reputation correlates to a decrease in submissions, and concludes that editors and publishers need to invest in peer review to maintain submission numbers.
- How can Publishers Balance between Authors and Reviewers? answers key questions pertaining to what authors want, what reviewers need, and proposed solutions.
- Increasing Diversity and Inclusion in Peer Review looks at the reasons why peer review lacks diversity, current efforts to increase diversity, and what else can be done to rectify diversity related concerns.
- Introducing Phenom Review: open source scholarly infrastructure by Hindawi focuses on the question “Can collective effort lead to a peer review system that actually serves the needs of the scholarly publishing community?”
- Peer Review Week Special: Challenges in Maintaining the Quality of Peer Review (podcast) features speaker Dr. Jan Mathys de Beer, a published author and peer-reviewer, sharing his opinion about the peer review process as a whole and associated challenges.
- Progressing Towards Transparency – More Journals Join Our Transparent Peer Review Pilot discusses Wiley’s peer review pilot which showcases their commitment to moving towards greater openness and reproducibility of research, including increasing transparency in peer review.
