Dear subscribers,
This month, we summarize a recent meeting on peer review and present two requests:
Support for open reports (signed or not): summary of the HHMI/Wellcome/ASAPbio Peer Review meeting
On February 7-9, 2018, a group of approximately 90 junior and senior scientists, publishers, editors, and funders convened at HHMI Headquarters in Chevy Chase, MD for a meeting on Transparency, Recognition, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences, organized by Wellcome, ASAPbio, and HHMI. The plenary sessions of the agenda were webcast, and all videos can be viewed in the webcast archive. Slides from talks can be downloaded from the agenda.
In the weeks leading up to the meeting, two surveys captured attitudes toward our current peer review system, and community members wrote commentaries to discuss visions for its evolution.
The event itself kicked off on the evening of Feburary 7th with keynotes from Erin O’Shea (President of HHMI), Jeremy Berg (Editor-in-Chief of Science) and Mike Lauer (Deputy Director for Extramural Research at NIH). After a morning of discussion, participants (both in-person and virtual) took part in an a vote on statements related to transparency and recognition to gauge the development of consensus. The results suggested that the majority of participants favored:
- Publishing the content of peer reviews (with or without the reviewers’ names) and making these reports a formal part of the scholarly record with an associated DOI,
- Formal recognition and credit for peer review activities from funding agencies and institutions, and
- Acknowledging all contributors to a peer review report (such as students and postdocs) when submitting it to a journal.
We will be organizing a white paper authorized by meeting participants and considering other steps to facilitate the actions above.
The meeting was covered in Science, NPR, Occam’s Typewriter, Inside eLife, and PLOS Blogs. Highlights from Twitter (#bioPeerReview) have been compiled by HHMI.
View the summary of the peer review meeting.
Preprint authors: please take a 5-minute survey
If you’ve authored a preprint in any field, please consider taking 5 minutes to fill out this survey, which will help our efforts to understand issues surrounding preprint licensing.
We’d also appreciate you sharing this survey with your networks by forwarding this email or retweeting this tweet.
Contribute to a list of preprint commentary venues & journal clubs
In an effort to understand the landscape of preprint discussion, post-publication peer review, and curation efforts, we’ve started a spreadsheet listing preprint commentary venues and other approaches to feedback and peer review. Please add anything that’s missing or inaccurate. If you run a preprint journal club or would be willing to give feedback to authors on an individual basis upon request, please feel free to add that to the second tab in the sheet!
Thanks,
Jessica Polka
Director, ASAPbio