This is a post written by Gracielle Higino about her community project that was funded in 2023.
I was tired of hearing students and colleagues sharing their bad experiences with reviewers. I was tired of working really hard to submit a paper for publication and receiving inconsiderate reviews and editorial decisions. We needed a change of culture in peer review: change it from being just a “Where’s Waldo” game of pointing out flaws and what the paper didn’t do towards fair criticisms based on what’s presented, and also reinforcing the strengths of the work. I believe that peer review can be kind and fair, while still being rigorous.
As with any cultural change, we need to focus on the new generation, the leaders to come, rather than the leaders in place. The new leaders are the ones who’ll drive change. I invited the young Masters, PhDs and postdocs from my community (the Computational Biodiversity Science and Services training program – BIOS2) to design the change they wanted to see in peer review. Some of them have never performed a review before, and it was delightful to see them discovering that they don’t need to wait to be invited – they can contribute to science by commenting on preprints, on specific topics they know about, or specific sections.
From June to November 2023, we met once a month to discuss what it looks like to write kind peer reviews in Ecology and Evolution. In the first meeting, we “reverse-engineered” a good review by going through the PREreview’s Open Reviewers Review Assessment Rubric and brainstorming what we thought was missing from the rubric, thinking about the specificities of our research area. In the following meetings, we reviewed a total of five preprints, all published in PREreview, and had a chat with Daniela Saderi about watching our biases when reviewing scientific products, and with Kristen Thyng about reviewing research software.
By our final meeting, we all had a clear understanding of how preprints and preprints reviews fit into the academic publishing system and felt more empowered and encouraged to review scientific manuscripts. With this knowledge, we got together to brainstorm our own guide for kind peer review in Computational Ecology, which is now published and publicly available on Zenodo.
The Community Project support from ASAPbio was instrumental in keeping participants motivated throughout this journey of learning by practice, and in promoting a welcoming and warm environment where we all felt comfortable to question, comment, and fail forward. The small seeds will now flourish in our own communities, where we’re hosting preprint review clubs, kind peer review training, and talking about preprints. These young leaders are now paving the way for a kinder and more collaborative future in science.
