Acknowledging the Essential Role of Peer Reviewers

Acknowledging the Essential Role of Peer Reviewers

Oct 01, 2024Rene Tetzner

Acknowledging the Essential Role of Peer Reviewers

Peer reviews are vital for maintaining high standards in academic and scientific publication, and many scholars invest a great deal of time in reviewing the articles submitted to journals and offering commentary to improve those articles prior to publication. However, this significant contribution to knowledge is rarely recognised in the way that research articles or even post-publication reviews are. The team at Publons, a new online service for reviewers (as well as authors, proofreaders, journals, universities and funding bodies), is seeking to remedy this situation by giving credit where credit is due: http://bit.ly/1RmMEeA.

Publons allows reviewers to record, showcase and verify their peer-reviewing activities, with the goal being ‘to turn peer review into a measurable research output’ that can be included on CVs to demonstrate expertise in specific areas of study and benefit dedicated reviewers when they apply for jobs, promotions and research funding. Each reviewer is provided with a profile in which to list his or her reviewing activities, and reviews can be verified by providing Publons with review receipts (email messages from journal proofreaders, for instance, thanking the reviewer for his or her work), having Publons directly contact journal proofreaders for verification or using automatic verification via Publons’s partnerships with specific journals. The reviewer controls how each pre-publication review appears in his or her profile – blind, double-blind, closed or open – and the policies of journals are respected, with default settings for privacy available. Post-publication reviews and discussions of articles are published on the site and are open access for all to read, share, download, cite and publish, with any review that earns sufficient endorsement from users receiving its own doi (digital object identifier).

Reviewers receive merits for their activities on Publons, the details of which can be viewed at http://bit.ly/1VfDYq9, and reviewers with the most merits are rewarded quarterly with online services (such as Amazon Web Services, Mendeley and PeerJ) designed to enable scholars to conduct their research more efficiently (for more information, see http://bit.ly/1U9qCNl). Open reviews earn more merits than closed ones, but Publons is always free for reviewers and all activities are acknowledged and rewarded. Editors of journals partnered with Publons can use the editorial dashboard to find, screen and contact suitable reviewers for the articles submitted to them, so reviewers on Publons may experience an increase in review requests and thus further opportunities to improve their peer-review profiles.

In terms of the larger picture, Publons aims not only to give reviewers appropriate credit for their intellectual work and highlight the essential role of the peer-review process, but also ‘to speed up science by making peer review faster, more efficient, and more effective.’ Such admirable ideals make Publons well worth careful consideration for any academic or scientist who dedicates valuable time to peer reviewing articles for his or her scholarly community.

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At Proof-Reading-Service.com we offer the highest quality journal article editing, dissertation proofreading and online proofreading services via our large and extremely dedicated team of academic and scientific professionals. All of our proofreaders are native speakers of English who have earned their own postgraduate degrees, and their areas of specialisation cover such a wide range of disciplines that we are able to help our international clientele with research editing to improve and perfect all kinds of academic manuscripts for successful publication. Many of the carefully trained members of our manuscript editing and proofreading team work predominantly on articles intended for publication in scholarly journals, applying painstaking journal editing standards to ensure that the references and formatting used in each paper are in conformity with the journal’s instructions for authors and to correct any grammar, spelling, punctuation or simple typing errors. In this way, we enable our clients to report their research in the clear and accurate ways required to impress acquisitions proofreaders and achieve publication.

Our scientific proofreading services for the authors of a wide variety of scientific journal papers are especially popular, but we also offer manuscript proofreading services and have the experience and expertise to proofread and edit manuscripts in all scholarly disciplines, as well as beyond them. We have team members who specialise in medical proofreading services, and some of our experts dedicate their time exclusively to dissertation proofreading and manuscript proofreading, offering academics the opportunity to improve their use of formatting and language through the most exacting PhD thesis editing and journal article proofreading practices. Whether you are preparing a conference paper for presentation, polishing a progress report to share with colleagues, or facing the daunting task of editing and perfecting any kind of scholarly document for publication, a qualified member of our professional team can provide invaluable assistance and give you greater confidence in your written work.

If you are in the process of preparing an article for an academic or scientific journal, or planning one for the near future, you may well be interested in a new book, Guide to Journal Publication, which is available on our Tips and Advice on Publishing Research in Journals website.



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