The universities of Valencia and Brescia, in collaboration with the Royal Society and publishing houses of the scientific magazines Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley, have developed a protocol that allows the exchange and study of the data generated by the review process of the scientific articles, which is known as peer review. The initiative is part of the COST action ‘PEERE: New frontiers of peer review’ and it has been tested in more than 150 magazines. The UV school of engineering is in charge of the management and processing of these data.
PEERE is a COST action (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) funded with more than half a million euros and that aims at improving the review process of scientific projects through a collaboration between the disciplines and implied sectors. ‘It will allow more magazines to know the prejudices against the publication of innovative research, analyse the effects of different review models of experts and determine the best way to reward reviewers, among other issues’, said Francisco Grimaldo, deputy director of the School of Engineering (ETSE-UV) and one of the two coordinators of the action.
The protocol anonymously deals with highly confidential information, such as the criteria stablished to decide to publish or not an article, who does the review and which elements can have influence on the selection. Grimaldo highlights: ‘a better expert review system will benefit the self-regulation processes and, in turn, it can increase the social recognition and credibility of science in Europe’.
During the three-year implementation period of this COST action, which started in May 2014, researchers have discovered common behaviour patterns in magazines and they have realised how peer review entails a greater scientific collaboration among parties. In addition to this, other provisional conclusion of the work is that peer review is a mechanism to improve the scientific work in which the greater scientific nearness of the reviewer to the work’s author the more positive reviews are.
According to Grimaldo, ‘the reviewer tone may influence the editor to rely more on one review than another’. He affirms that it has been found that the more experienced scientists do not usually justify their verifications, in contrast to the inexperienced ones, who specify more and can do more in-depth reviews.
The data analysis has also highlighted that when it comes to opponents, the reviews are usually more critical; that the young people are much more critical than older people or that the geographical origin of papers can determine their publication.
These results will be emphasised next March during the celebration of the 1st European congress of peer review, which will take place in Rome with the collaboration of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE).
Recently, Flaminio Squazzoni (University of Brescia, Italy), Francisco Grimaldo (Universitat de València) and Ana Marušyć (University of Split, Croatia) have published a letter in the prestigious magazine Nature Communications, ‘Journals could share peer-review data’. In this letter, they invite the publisher and academic sectors to join the PEERE action.
PEERE: New frontiers of peer review
PEERE is a COST action (May 2014-May 2018) that involves more than 100 researchers from more than 30 countries, which come from all the fields of knowledge. It was born in response to recent evidence of failure in some peer reviews, due to prejudices, mistakes, local actions and misconduct. Therefore, the objectives are to analyse the peer review process in different scientific fields, to combine the quantitative and qualitative research, to incorporate the experimental and computational discoveries and to evaluate the consequences of the different models. It is also intended to involve stakeholders in the exchange of data and to define collaboratively a joint research agenda.
Letter in Nature Communications:
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v546/n7658/full/546352a.html
PEERE COST Action:
