Scott Edmunds highlights opportunities to improve the publishing process by improving transparency, accountability and speed

As editor in chief of GigaScience, for a decade we have increased transparency and trust in our published work by throwing open the entire peer review process, and letting people really ‘look under the hood’. While this isn’t a new concept, the first experiments in open peer review go back at least 40 years and the medical community started embracing it in the late 90s, in the last few years the practice has become increasingly mainstream. Many Nature Journals and PLOS have taken the leap in opening their review process, and the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science specifically highlighted open peer review as one of the approaches its member states should promote for open science. The challenges from the Covid-19 pandemic makes these moves even more timely, as increasing transparency in research is an extremely useful weapon in fighting scepticism in the scientific process during these turbulent times.

As peer review has opened, reviewers are now able to gain credit for their hard work, and technological approaches are now available to help them advertise and amplify their peer reviewing duties. On top of third-party platforms that capture peer review history, such as the pioneering Publons, ORCID has provided peer review functionality and a ‘Reviews Activity’ section on its profile pages. Leveraging this, journals such as GigaScience, F1000Research and PeerJ have been giving their peer reviews DOIs to make them independently citable and easily claimed in author ORCID profiles.