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Peer Review Week is dedicated to discussing all things peer review, and this year’s theme focuses on peer review and the future of publishing.

Ensuring that peer review keeps up with, and in some cases drives, ongoing developments in the wider academic and scholarly publishing community is key to enabling all parts of the process to work together efficiently.

In honour of Peer Review Week, we’re exploring five ways to align peer review practices with the future of publishing, and how HRB Open Research is already working towards this.

A changing publishing landscape

Scholarly publishing has undergone many changes over recent years and continues to do so, with an increasing focus on open and equitable distribution of research.

Some of the key areas of change include:

• Creation of more open access journals
• Encouraging open data, software, and code for reproducibility
• Broadening publishable research outputs to a wider range of publications, including methods and data
• Supporting wider academic achievements beyond publishing articles and moving away from metrics like Journal Impact Factors to define the value of research
• Centring collaboration over competition

Much of this has been driven forward by policies of funders, governments, and community organisations, from the DORA Declaration to cOAlition S and the recent Council conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing.

Challenges in peer review

But, as highlighted in this year’s theme, peer review has not always kept pace with these changes in the publishing landscape.

While scholarly publishing is undergoing rapid changes, peer review practices have remained fairly static and, on the whole, do not always reflect wider developments.

With most processes still focusing on double-blind or single-blind models, taking many months (or sometimes years) to complete, and being led solely by editors, this static approach is at odds with the open and collaborative direction of scholarly publishing more widely.

As a result, it’s key that peer review practices evolve in the same way as the wider community.

Supporting the future of publishing through peer review

Despite these challenges, there are ways in which peer review practices can support scholarly publishing’s transformation and contribute to the future of publishing.

Open peer review

Some publishing venues, including HRB Open Research, are using an open peer review model.

This means that not only are reviewer identities shared transparently, but so are all reviewer comments and author responses.

Open peer review ensures that all elements of the publishing process are fully transparent, not just the articles themselves, and supports open research practices being adopted and promoted worldwide.

Beyond this, open review practices help to:

• Promote deeper learning opportunities for both authors and reviewers, with a genuine and open dialogue on both sides of the process
• Ensure everyone benefits and learns from reviewer feedback, including article readers, helping to improve their own future research
• Provide more constructive feedback and reduce the possibility for bias by improving accountability, often lacking in single- or double-blind reviews
• Allow authors and others in the academic community to identify potential collaborators or peer reviewers for their own work

Read more about open peer review at HRB Open Research.

Collaborative peer review

In most cases, editors lead the peer review process, with authors kept in the dark as to who has been asked and who has contributed final responses.

However, nobody knows their research better than authors themselves. In most cases, authors are best placed to use their expertise in the field and specialist knowledge of the subject area to select the most appropriate reviewers for their work.

However, this also needs to be balanced with potential conflicts of interest and possibilities for bias.

As a result, a collaborative approach to peer review, where authors and editors work together to identify appropriate reviewers, can help to achieve this balance.

This novel approach taken by HRB Open Research ensures that peer review remains robust while also transforming the way peer review is conducted to give authors greater autonomy over the process – which is key to the future of publishing.

Post-publication peer review

One of the main challenges of traditional peer review is the lengthy publication delays often faced by authors, with articles taking months – or years – to make it through peer review and be published.

This is largely due to the static practice of publishing work after peer review. These delays fail to align with technological and editorial advances more widely in scholarly publishing to become more efficient and can also hamper the timely dissemination of work.

HRB Open Research’s innovative approach of publishing research first and then undertaking formal, invited peer review can combine the speed of a pre-print server with the research integrity of traditional models.

This balances both a robust scientific record with the speed required to transform academic publishing, especially in medical and health fields.

Peer review for all outputs

A key theme highlighted in this year’s Peer Review Week is the growing importance of publishing all scholarly outputs, outside of traditional research articles.

This is key to supporting open research practices, but it’s also ensuring that these outputs are validated and can be trusted.

As a result, not only does HRB Open Research support researchers in publishing all outputs through diverse article types, but each of these is also peer reviewed and can be cited independently, including data, software, and methods.

This ensures both the robustness of research and increased credit for authors and can help peer review practices to keep pace with wider scholarly advancements.

Wider opportunities for academic career assessment

A major ongoing shift in scholarly publishing focuses on research and career assessment, and the need to broaden what we value within academia.

Traditionally, research articles and the venue in which they are published are the main driving factors of research and career assessment, focusing on metrics like Journal Impact Factor.

However, initiatives like the DORA Declaration and CoARA seek to widen what can constitute as academic success, putting greater emphasis on activities outside of publishing research.

Acting as a peer reviewer is one way in which researchers, including early career researchers (ECRs), can build their skills and demonstrate value in their work. As a result, HRB Open Research is open to peer review from all career stages, including co-reviewing for ECRs, to help promote opportunities for academic activity.

Peer reviewing with HRB Open Research

If you’d like to be part of the change, you can find out more about peer review at HRB Open Research and express your interest in becoming a reviewer yourself.

If you’d like to benefit from this peer review approach for your own work, find out more about publishing your HRB-funded work with the platform.

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