Skip to navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to footer

Welcome to the new ASAPbio website! See what’s on the roadmap for 2025.

New to preprints and open peer review? Explore our resource library.

Peer review meeting summary

Transparency, Recognition, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences (February 2018)

For more information, go to the main event page.

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.

Agenda and outcomes

The event 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:

1. 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,

2. Formal recognition and credit for peer review activities from funding agencies and institutions, and

3. Acknowledging all contributors to a peer review report (such as students and postdocs) when submitting it to a journal.

We will be organizing a meeting report and considering other steps to facilitate the actions above.

Materials and recordings

The plenary sessions of the agenda were webcast, and all videos can be viewed in the webcast archive (below). Slides from talks can be downloaded from the agenda.

Media coverage

The meeting was covered in ScienceNPROccam’s TypewriterInside eLife, and PLOS Blogs.

 

Highlights from Twitter

Notable tweets from the conference hashtag (#bioPeerReview) have been compiled below by HHMI.

Pre-meeting surveys

Ahead of the meeting, two surveys captured attitudes toward our current peer review system.

Infographic of peer review survey demographics with 295 responses. Pie chart of positions with faculty (36%), postdoc (21%), and others. Bar charts show sectors, work locations, fields, and scholarly communication roles. ASAPbio logo included.
A slide titled General attitudes toward peer review displays two charts. On the left, a pie chart shows satisfaction levels: 24% very satisfied, 41% satisfied, 25% dissatisfied, 6% very dissatisfied, 1% dont know, 3% not answered. On the right, a bar chart shows satisfaction levels over time from an open peer review survey. The bottom includes citation details and hashtags: #bioPeerReview and ASAPbio.
Bar graph showing responses to problems in peer review for life sciences manuscripts. Issues include lack of constructive reviews, time-wasting, insufficient feedback, and bias. Each issue is ranked as a major or minor problem by respondents.