The Why’s and How’s of Open Peer Review—a Panel Discussion for Peer Review Week 2021
Join us for a Panel Discussion on Open Peer Review for Peer Review Week 2021
This year, Peer Review Week is taking place September 20th through 24th, and ScienceOpen has put together an expert panel to discuss the why’s and how’s of open peer review. Peer Review Week is an annual weeklong event that is led by the community to celebrate the essential role that peer review plays in scientific and academic communication. The event brings together all those committed to sharing the central message that quality peer review, whatever shape or form it might take, is critical to scholarly research. As a proponent of open peer review, we thought it would be the perfect topic to discuss during Peer Review Week this year. Below you will find the details and registration link for the panel we have assembled to discuss everything on the topic of open peer review which will take place on September 24th at 4 pm London time (UTC+1). We would love to have you join this free, online event during Peer Review Week!
Open Peer Review in Action
Although open peer review still makes up only a small fraction of peer review policies at academic journals around the world, it is increasingly accepted and even celebrated by authors and reviewers. Because the definition and implementation of open peer review can vary widely, ScienceOpen is hosting this panel discussion to explore a range of new and established publishing platforms with an open peer review strategy. The UCL Press publishing platform UCL Open, the new Microbiology Society platform Access Microbiology, the SciPost platform with a new addition in Chemistry, and the Sciety platform developed by ELife will share their experiences on what works and what challenges they have faced in open peer review. If you are a publisher, editor, author or reviewer with questions on the why’s and how’s of open peer review, we’re inviting you to join the discussion!
This event will take place on the Friday of Peer Review Week, September 24th between 16:00-17:00 London time. Registration for this event is free to all and it will be hosted online and then posted to YouTube afterwards for everyone’s convenience. ScienceOpen is very supportive of open peer review and is always encouraging members of the academic community to get involved in the conversations around open peer review. Come offer your perspectives, or just sit back and learn from these experts’ firsthand experiences in the industry.
Click here to register on Eventbrite!
Meet the Panelists
The discussion will be hosted by ScienceOpen’s CEO, Stephanie Dawson. The panelists include Ian Caswell of UCL Press, Alexander Mulhern of Microbiology Society, Jean-Sébastien Caux of SciPost and Hannah Drury of Sciety, an entity of eLife Sciences Publications Ltd.
Jean-Sébastien Caux is Professor of Low-Dimensional Quantum Condensed Matter at the University of Amsterdam. After undergraduate studies in Montréal, he moved to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and obtained his doctorate in 1998. Following a postdoc at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, he returned to Oxford as Postdoctoral Fellow in All Souls College, finally landing in Amsterdam in 2003. He is the recipient of (among others) the NWO Vici and ERC Advanced grants. Prof. Caux is a strong believer in openness in scientific publishing. He is the founder, chairman and main developer of SciPost, a non-profit foundation whose mission is to provide publishing solutions serving the best interests of science and scientists, and which runs the SciPost.org genuine open access publication portal.
Hannah Drury joined eLife in 2015, initially shepherding editors and authors through the submission and review process. She took a sideways move into product and technology in 2018 and has since been working with several cross-functional teams to build software to support scholarly peer review. In early 2020 Hannah started work on Sciety, a new application for navigating the growing preprint landscape via open evaluation and curation.
Alexander Mulhern is currently the Head of Journal Development at the Microbiology Society, providing strategic editorial direction across the Society’s portfolio of journals in support of the microbiology community. Alexander works closely with Society colleagues, editorial boards and with other microbiologists in academia, industry, and clinical environments to deliver the Society’s strategic objectives, particularly in relation to advancing the understanding of microbiology and championing the contribution made by microbiology, Society members and their work in addressing global challenges. Prior to this role Alexander spent several years in journal development at BioMed Central and Springer Nature.
Ian Caswell is the Journals Manager at UCL Press and leads on the press’s journals programme. After graduating from Reading University in the UK he worked for Wiley and then for Biomed Central in multiple open access journal editorial capacities within life and health sciences subjects, before joining UCL Press in 2017 to launch and develop the programme. UCL Press now publishes 14 diamond open access journals across humanities, law, social sciences subjects, as well as the new UCL Open: Environment open science journal, and also offers open access student journal publishing services to the university.
Stephanie Dawson grew up in northern California, studied Biology at Yale University and received a PhD in German Literature from the University of Washington. She spent over 10 years at the academic publisher De Gruyter in Berlin in the fields of biology and chemistry in both journals and book publishing. 2013 she joined ScienceOpen as managing director. With ScienceOpen she has been exploring scholarly communication in a digital environment, experimenting with open access publishing, discovery, preprints, open post-publication peer review, community curation, metadata enrichment, and alternative metrics.
To register, go to the Eventbrite page here. We hope to see you there on Friday, Sept. 24th!
