Peer review and the future of publishing
| 25 September, 2023 | admin |
Peer Review Week is dedicated to discussing all things peer review, and this year’s theme focuses on peer review and the future of publishing.
Understanding how peer review can support developments in the wider academic and scholarly publishing community, and how peer review practices need to evolve to keep pace with them, are central to this year’s theme.
In honour of Peer Review Week, we spoke to Sheridan Willis, F1000 Senior Associate Publisher, to get her thoughts on this topic.
Before we get into some of the challenges we see in peer review, do you think that peer review remains an important element of the research process?
I believe that peer review is important in a number of ways for researchers, funders, and the public.
It acts as a way of assuring integrity, originality, and methodological rigour within research. Having experts within a research field (who have not contributed to the article in question) read and provide feedback on a manuscript holds authors accountable and encourages them to produce work of a high standard.
For funders themselves, they can see that the research they fund is being done conscientiously and in support of key goals.
Peer review also acts as a way of improving the quality of manuscripts that are submitted to publication venues. Revising the manuscript in response to reviewers’ comments ensures a higher quality of research output and increased trust in the findings.
Finally, on a more personal level, peer review (when done openly, with open reviewer and author identities) can lead to networking and collaboration opportunities within your research community. This is especially important for early career researchers looking to build their network.
While peer review still has a role to play in scholarly publishing, it has its challenges. What would you say were the main challenges we currently face in peer review?
Something that has always been a challenge but has become increasingly so over the last few years, is the availability of experts to review articles.
This is largely due to the increased number of publications that have been produced globally by researchers, which then places extra strain on a small pool of reviewers, leading to delays in publication in traditional journals.
Similarly, even with new approaches such as post-publication peer review (used by Wellcome Open Research), it can still take some time for articles to pass peer review and be indexed accordingly.
These delays across the industry mean that articles are either not being published in a timely manner in journals or, in the case of post-publication peer review, not discoverable in a timely manner in appropriate indexing databases, such as PubMed and Scopus.
As publication times increase, it impacts important and timely research questions, especially within rapidly developing global health situations.
As is often cited, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for research to be conducted and shared as quickly as possible to help develop responses and discover the effects of the virus in real-time.
What do you think the future of peer review looks like in light of these challenges? And what do you think needs to happen to achieve this?
I think anything that can improve efficiency and reduce peer review burden would be ideal.
AI technologies are increasingly discussed, so incorporating these into the peer review process could be an exciting development, for example providing automated reports.
Streamlining the review process and reducing times to publication and indexation would be of benefit to researchers and reviewers alike, as it is no small task to provide feedback on articles.
However, it’s important that publishers and peer reviewers alike maintain important ethical standards, and so using these technologies would have to be done in a very careful way.
I think it’s also important that readers and authors are made aware of where automation has been included as part of the process, so they can make their own judgments on the review.
Are there any areas you think that peer review needs to evolve to make the current publishing landscape?
Peer review has largely remained the same for centuries, with perhaps a few differing options of peer review, such as single or double-blind, and open peer review.
However, what we are seeing more broadly across scholarly publishing is a change in the types of research outputs being valued by researchers, the public, and other stakeholders alike.
The focus now is not just on Research Articles, but also Data Notes, Living Systematic Reviews, plain language summaries of articles, and public and community engagement outputs.
For these differing types of research methodologies, we need to ensure that reviewers receive credit for all outputs of research they review, such as through Publons and linking their ORCID IDs.
We also need to look to expand reviewers beyond the current academics – should we be looking for patients and members of the public to review articles? Should we be looking for statisticians or data scientists to review data and software?
This expands the reviewing pool to be more equitable and involves those with lived experience, which could be one small way to help reduce the burden on current peer reviewers.
Wellcome Open Research is already looking towards some elements of this future peer review approach you’ve identified. How can the peer review model at Wellcome Open Research help overcome these challenges and meet the needs of future publishing?
One of the ways that Wellcome Open Research is looking towards the future of peer review is through setting up high throughput semi-automated publishing and reviews, with a collaboration with the Darwin Tree of Life project.
This project represents an innovative, streamlined approach to contextualising genome sequences, to produce and publish content at speed. Through peer review innovation, each article will undergo a quality control process, with an automated review that summarizes the genome completeness. This review will be available alongside the article upon publication.
We then hope to validate this further with another peer review report from a leading expert in the genomics field.
This is just one such way we hope to improve efficiencies and hope to rely on fewer human peer reviewers for each of these articles, especially given the ambitions of the project to publish over 70,000 Genome Notes via this collaboration.
Another way Wellcome Open Research is looking to the future is through its use of a post-publication peer review process.
This allows an article to be published before peer review and allows authors and researchers to access the content without delay. Peer review reports are then published alongside the article, with the reviewers’ names, affiliations, and full reports openly available for all to read.
This increases accountability and quality of feedback in the review process and offers a dialogue between authors and reviewers, with readers able to understand the changes that have been made to a manuscript in response to reviewers’ suggestions.
Finally, having open reports and reviewer identities means that reviewers can get credit for their work, by linking their ORCID ID to their reports, and all reports are independently citable for increased visibility.
Thank you for your insights, Sheridan!
Peer reviewing with Wellcome Open Research
If you’d like to be part of the change, you can learn more about peer review at Wellcome Open Research and express your interest in becoming a reviewer.
If you’d like to benefit from this peer review approach for your own work, find out more about publishing your Wellcome-funded work with the platform.