Peer review 'must keep pace with rapidly changing landscape'

Systems must evolve and advance to adapt to interdisciplinary processes, writes Faye Holst

Next week is peer review week – an annual event that celebrates the value of peer review and raises awareness about its crucial role in maintaining the quality and integrity of academic research. 

Although the peer review process has remained broadly the same for hundreds of years, the landscape of scientific research is evolving at pace. The arrival of preprint servers like arXiv have become increasingly popular, allowing researchers to share their findings before formal peer review, and the availability of computational tools such as artificial intelligence is revolutionising scientific discovery. At the same time modern scientific problems often require interdisciplinary approaches, blending fields like biology, computer science, and engineering. To keep in step with these changes, our peer review systems must evolve and advance. 

Listening and learning

“The best way to innovate peer review successfully is to engage with the research community and listen carefully to their wants and needs,” says Laura Feetham-Walker, IOP Publishing’s (IOPP) Reviewer Engagement Manager and winner of the 2024 APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) Award for Innovation in Scholarly Communication. Feetham-Walker has led on peer review innovations at IOPP since 2020 and has been instrumental in implementing initiatives that enhance reviewer recognition, improve transparency, and streamline the peer review process.

“One of the major issues in peer review is the lack of training and recognition. Peer review plays such a vital role in the scientific endeavour, yet reviewers must often figure out how to review on their own without formal training. We introduced our ‘Peer Review Excellence: training and certification programme’ in 2020 to support our reviewers. The programme offers a free online training course, tailored for the physical sciences and geared towards early-career-researchers. It also gives our expert reviewers the recognition they deserve with IOP Trusted Reviewer status.” 

“I do not know any other publishers for whom I reviewed that have a recognition programme. This is a very unusual feature of IOPP, but I do appreciate it. It shows that time and energy invested in each review is valued, as serious reviewing is part of our job and takes time,” adds Marie Graff, Senior Lecturer in the Applied Mathematics Unit at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. 

Innovations in peer review

IOPP has introduced other novel ways to make the review process more transparent and inclusive including initiatives such as co-review, double anonymous peer review, transparent peer review, and the option for reviewers to receive feedback on their reviewer reports.  

Under the co-review model, reviewers can formally invite a colleague to collaborate on a review, ensuring that both contributors receive proper recognition for their efforts via the Web of Science reviewer recognition service. This has led to higher quality reviews according to IOPP’s report rating system. Sharing his experience, Dr. L. P. McDonnell, Research Associate at University of Cambridge and reviewer with IOP Publishing says: “Co-review has the potential to drastically increase the engagement of PhD students and early career researchers with the review process and receive recognition. It lets students gain insight into the review and publishing process before submitting their own research. In my own experience it was not until I published my own papers that I was invited to participate as a reviewer. Gaining this experience earlier would no doubt have strengthened my publications and given me a good appreciation for the timescales and publication process. The exposure of working as a reviewer is also beneficial in providing a broader perspective of the wider scientific field and reminds us, we are not working in isolation, no matter how dark or lonely the lab may be.” 

Transparent but anonymous

Another issue that IOP Publishing aims to tackle is bias in peer review, which can compromise objectivity and fairness. As the first physics publisher to do so, they’ve introduced two complimentary approaches across their open access journals: double-anonymous peer review, where reviewer and author identities are concealed to reduce bias, and transparent peer review, which publishes the full peer review history alongside the article. This increases accountability, recognises reviewers, and helps train future reviewers.

“During the review process the opportunity for a discourse between authors and reviewers is a key aspect of the scientific process. No research should be conducted solely in one’s own echo chamber,” adds McDonnell. “These discussions provide valuable insight into both the quality of the peer review process and may inform interested readers of nuances of the paper. Of course, to realise the true value of reviewers’ reports we should aim for a system where reviewers no longer need be anonymised and need not fear the publication of their contributions to scientific publishing.”

Feedback is key

"Peer review is an art. It takes time and consideration to provide constructive feedback, yet authors too often receive unprofessional, mean-spirited, or irrelevant reviews," explains Feetham-Walker. "Most peer reviewers are doing a brilliant job in difficult circumstances and would welcome support and training to help them improve further."

According to a global peer review survey, which gathered responses from over 3,000 reviewers worldwide, many reviewers see feedback as a key form of recognition. Among the most valued are feedback on the final decision of the paper, assessments of the review’s quality, and access to other reviewers' comments. IOP Publishing provides all these types of feedback to its reviewers in support of greater transparency and openness in peer review.

“The best way for me to improve as a reviewer and to maintain a high standard of review is to receive feedback on my performance. The IOP trusted reviewer status and outstanding reviewer rewards I have received have given me a lot of confidence in my abilities to act as a professional scientist and reviewer,” McDonnell says.

“We know that there are still a lot of things we can do to improve the peer review process, and we will continue to listen to our reviewers as we develop new ways of working. Feedback is proving valuable not just for us but for our reviewers too as proven by our latest innovations in peer review,” concludes Feetham-Walker.

Faye Holst is Communications Manager at IOP Publishing