peer review week

Peer Review Week 2017: Transparency in Review, and other innovations

By Steven Inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer, Springer Nature At Springer Nature every week is Peer Review Week. Each week our dedicated in-house editorial staff spend thousands of hours co-ordinating the process of peer review, to ensure and improve the quality of the scientific literature we publish and in doing so, advance discovery. We support our Editors in Chief, Editorial Board Members, Section Editors, peer reviewers and authors by providing guidance and systems to enable them to improve manuscripts. Furthermore, we’re trialling innovative new practices through small-scale pilots, while also exploring grander ideas such as the potential role of Artificial Intelligence. … Read more…

Paying it forward with Peer Review

As part of the Peer Review Week 2017 we speak to Senior Editor Annett Buettner about the Filter of Hope initiative, which donates a water filter for each peer review completed in the Springer journal Environmental Earth Sciences. Q) How did you come up with this idea? It was over a beer, sometime in 2014, where some colleagues quite informally talked about peer reviewers and the fact that we needed to reward them in some way for the work that they do. We wanted an easy-to-implement, ethical and financially feasible solution and got thinking after that evening. Finally it was … Read more…

Transparency in Peer Review: Conference Proceedings

The Peer Review Week 2017 celebrates the importance of peer review in maintaining the quality and accuracy of science. Today we shed light on the Peer Review process in Conference Proceedings. Written by Aliaksandr Birukou Conference Proceedings can be a great format for publishing important and valuable research and communicating new results much faster than journals. Did you know that conference proceedings are not just a simple compilation of conference papers but also go through rigorous, often-times a stricter peer review process? Let’s look at an example. The proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2017, … Read more…

Peer Review from an Editor’s Perspective: Q&A

We asked Steven Kettell, Co-Executive Editor of British Politics questions related to peer review. Read on for an insider look at the peer review process. How would you define a good peer reviewer?A good reviewer is someone who is on time, honest and clear. A bad reviewer (if they ever both to send in their comments) will meander about without reaching a firm decision (clue: tick a box!), be full of excessive suggestions or (worse still) be so brief as to be pointless. Two lines is not a review! If the paper is being rejected then a reviewer should be clear (but not … Read more…