Peer Review Week 2017 is all about transparency

At ScienceOpen, we have been pushing for greater transparency in peer review since our inception. We inject transparency at multiple levels, by identifying referees, publishing reports, providing formal recognition for contributions, and encouraging open interaction on our platform (more details here).

This is why we’re extremely stoked to see the theme for this year’s Peer Review Week to be all around the theme of transparency!

The idea for the first Peer Review Week, held in 2015, grew out of informal conversations between ORCID, ScienceOpen, PRE (Peer Review Evaluation), Sense About Science, and Wiley, the organizations that planned and launched the initiative in 2015. Last year, ScienceOpen hosted a webinar with Nature, PaperHive, and Publons along the theme of recgnising review.

In 2017, we are helping to organise a session at the Peer Review Congress to help showcase what peer review should look like when it works. We look forward to working with the other partner organisations and the global scholarly community in helping to make peer review a fairer, more transparent process.

From the website:

What is Peer Review Week?

Peer Review Week is a global event celebrating the essential role that peer review plays in maintaining scientific quality. The event brings together individuals, institutions, and organizations committed to sharing the central message that good peer review, whatever shape or form it might take, is critical to scholarly communications. We organize virtual and in-person events – webinars, interviews and social media activities.

Why Peer Review Week? 

• 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

For our part, at ScienceOpen we have over 30 million article records all available for public, post-publication peer review (PPPR), 3 million of which are full-text Open Access. This functionality is a response to increasing calls for continuous moderation of the published research literature, a consistent questioning of the functionality of the traditional peer review model (some examples in this post), and an increasing recognition that scientific discourse does not stop at the ‘event’ point of publication for any research article.

We strongly believe that a new gold standard of peer review is required, and that transparency should be one of the core components and principles for this.

You can follow the developments and discussion for Peer Review week on Twitter at #PeerRevWk17.