Improvements, Iterations, and Infrastructure

Cambridge University Press has a set of objectives in the peer review space . . . with several question marks still:

• Objectives:
  • Increase transparency
  • Support reviewer recognition
  • Offer more training resources for reviewers
  • Improve internal processes to make peer review more efficient
• Questions:
  • What are the evolving challenges to peer review and opportunities in evolving forms of scholarly communication for peer review and how do we respond to them?
  • How do we ensure that we communicate the value that peer review adds to research and make visible the essential role publishers play in providing this service?
  • Where are we best placed to experiment in peer review?

While the work we’re doing in the peer review space cuts across these areas, a lot of attention has gone into thinking about both keeping up and contributing to the evolving landscape of peer review. This has led us to think more about both the infrastructure behind peer review and where we’re best placed to experiment in peer review.

Our approach to these objectives and questions has been to collaborate and pilot. We don’t take a one size fits all approach to our portfolio so we are able to do pilots with some of our owned journals or with interested societies. Examples of this include:

• As mentioned in Wednesday’s announcement we are launching a new open peer review pilot that will ensure that the open peer review materials are an integral part of the article to which they relate, while at the same time ensuring that they can be accessed and cited as free-standing contributions to the scholarly record in their own right.

• This month Political Analysis will begin trialing the use of Code Ocean, a cloud-based reproducibility platform. Code Ocean enables authors to share the code and data underlying their findings and provides an interface through which any reader can easily view and run the code. The use of Code Ocean will complement the replication step that is already a key part of the journal’s editorial review process. Authors in Political Analysis are required to make code and data available for a data analyst to check before formal acceptance, in order to ensure that the results presented in their article can be reproduced. Code Ocean will be used to assist this process. Published articles will contain a Code Ocean widget that allows readers to interact with the code and data.

• We joined the Blockchain for Peer Review initiative as a founding partner with the goal to build a cross-publisher infrastructure for creating a peer review ledger. The blockchain enables the peer review ledger, but it also creates a neutral infrastructure for peer review information. The initiative is very interested in how the blockchain can be used or integrated further into the broader scholarly communications infrastructure and we invite those kinds of conversations!

• We are collaborating with bioRxiv to integrate submission from their preprint server to our peer review submissions for six Cambridge University Press life science journals on a trial basis. Given that bioRxiv has already integrated with over 100 journals, I don’t claim this as CUP’s innovation but I do think it shows how we’ve moved away from a closed and completely proprietary view of peer review infrastructure. Our goal is to support the researcher by reducing effort/time during submission of manuscripts to journal peer review systems.

• We are also working to do more around supporting reviewers in reviewing data and other kinds of supplementary material. Our Peer Review Hub launched last year at Peer Review Week and we’ve added resources for this year’s Peer Review Week.

At the end of the day, we view peer review as an integral part of the process to ensure high-quality publication and that guides the choice of the tools we use within our own infrastructure and experimentation rather than the other way around.