FEATURE Peer review
Tracking and validating reviews
Childhood friends formed New Zealand-based Publons to help academics build a reputation for their reviews, writes Siân Harris
W
hen Andrew Preston and Daniel Johnson were boys riding their bikes and playing football in their home town of Whakatane, New Zealand,
they had probably never heard of peer review. They certainly didn’t imagine that one day they would form a company together that aims to improve the process.
Nonetheless, that is exactly what happened. The result is Publons, an open-access peer- review platform where academics can build reputation for reviewing, rating, and discussing academic research.
The idea for the start-up came about when Preston was doing post-doctoral research in physics at Boston University, USA. He and Johnson, a self-taught software developer, were discussing the challenges of research communication. They talked about Stack Overflow, a website that provides free questions and answers for programmers, and wondered why nothing similar existed in scholarly publishing.
Out of this came the idea of doing something themselves. As Johnson explained: ‘Our ultimate aim is to speed up science and improve the slow and inefficient peer-review process. We see that reviewers don’t have any incentive to do reviews.’
There are two sides to Publons’ approach. The first is to improve post-publication peer review. According to the company, ‘post-publication reviews will no longer need to spend months or years working their way through the literature, but will instead become part of an ongoing
10 Research Information FEBRUARY/MARCH 2014
Friends since childhood... and Andrew Preston (left in both pictures) was best man at Daniel Johnson’s wedding
conversation, immediately available and accessible to anyone, anywhere.’ The second aspect of Publons’ work is to give credit for pre-publication peer review, to get information from journals about who does reviews and to allow reviewers to share this information on their websites. The aim is to act as a central hub for journals and authors, recording all peer review whether it is done through Publons or elsewhere and building up author profiles. This approach, says the company, will ‘give pre-publication reviewers credit for their work, providing positive incentives to produce high-quality reviews, and giving journal editors a large pool of excellent reviewers.’
Johnson said: ‘A lot of people spend a lot of time evaluating research but these contributions are rarely captured. Publons is not about trying to get people to do more work but about allowing them to get more recognition.’
He added that the company is considering an overall score for reviewers that takes into account public review, blind review, and feedback on reviews. ‘The opportunities are enormous,’ he observed.
The company was formed in February 2013
in Wellington, New Zealand. It was accepted into a local business acceleration programme, which provided some seed funding and the opportunity to pitch to investors. From this, Publons raised a round of seed funding that enabled it to employ some more people. Now the business has seven employees. ‘We are still at the early stages but are in talks with a couple of journals. It is a rather large challenge for journals to find good reviewers
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