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Community call: revealing quality in peer review through increased transparency

September 20, 9am PDT, 12pm EDT, 6pm CEST

The theme of this year’s Peer Review Week, “quality in peer review,” should resonate with anyone—author, referee, or reader—invested in the process of formal publication. But how can those without a direct window into the peer review process be assured of its quality, both the entire body of peer review that a journal or project organizes, and more specifically the reviews covering an individual article?

This call will feature short presentations from speakers who take different approaches to demystify the peer review process, to be followed by an interactive discussion.

Speakers

  • Chris Jackson, Professor at Imperial College, advocates for signing peer reviews
  • Quincey Justman, Editor in Chief of Cell Systems, is experimenting with publishing peer review
  • Amy Brand, Director of the MIT Press, is co-lead of the Peer Review Transparency project, which seeks to create agreed-upon terms for describing how a work has been peer reviewed
  • Tony Ross-Hellauer, Leader of the Open and Reproducible Research Group at Graz University of Technology, is surfacing journal peer review policies with Transpose
  • Bahar Mehmani, Reviewer Experience Lead at Elsevier, has participated in data sharing with the PEERE initiative

Questions for discussion

  • Who (authors, reviewers, editors, readers) might benefit most from this form of transparency, and who might actually be damaged by it?
  • How reliable is this approach in representing “quality,” or what happened in the peer review process? What is missing?
  • How vulnerable is this approach to misinterpretations or misunderstandings? What are the potential unintended consequences?

ReimagineReview is a registry of platforms and experiments innovating around peer review of scientific outputs. Our community call series provides an opportunity to discuss pressing issues (for example, bias in peer review) relevant to these projects.

This call will be recorded for public posting in its entirety.  

Register here. View calendar entry (and add to your calendar) here.

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