Feature
Call for diversity
Be it traditional or transparent, peer review players from the West want more reviews from the East, reports Rebecca Pool
Ask Andrew Preston what impact his company, Publons, has had on the complex, changing world of peer review, and he quickly answers, ‘I don’t know if I am the right person to answer that question’.
Ask again, and his hopes for recognition
and transparency become clear. ‘When we [he and Daniel Johnston] started out in 2012, we’d talk to publishers, and even researchers, about recognition and transparent review and we’d see very little interest.
‘But six years on, I would like to think our
work has increased awareness and has also got the industry moving in a way that is really important,’ he adds. His words follow the latest Publons Global State of Peer Review report; the largest study of this emotive system for research evaluation. Bought by Clarivate in 2017, Publons was able to combine the results of its survey of more than 11,000 researchers with data from Publons, Web of Science and ScholarOne manuscripts databases. The results underlined the unequivocal
importance of peer review to researchers, the over-riding need for review recognition – 84 per cent of respondents stated institutions should more explicitly require and recognise contributions – and a
4 Research Information February/March 2019
growing interest in review transparency. Preston says he isn’t surprised by the widespread demand for recognition, given the rising profile of peer review among industry players. ‘You can recognise peer review now,’ he adds. ‘Before Publons and other [organisations and initiatives] came along it was difficult to prove what you had reviewed, but in the past five to six years, this has changed.’ And he also believes a shift to greater
transparency in peer review is truly underway. ‘We found that younger, early- career researchers preferred the concept of transparent peer review far more [than mid- and late-career reviewers],’ he says. ‘Over the coming years we will see more and more transparent review, as those young researchers grow into their careers.’ However, diversity – or a lack of it –
also featured prominently in the report, with results indicating that researchers from emerging regions, including China, Brazil, India and South Korea, are under- represented in the peer review process. For example, in 2017, China produced
0.8 reviews per submission compared with an average of 2.3 reviews per submission for all established regions, including the US, UK and Japan. Yet at the same time, results indicated that journal editors are generally located in established regions,
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