The theme of this year’s Peer Review Week is transparency in peer review. Many peer review experts will be gathering in Chicago in September for the Peer Review Congress (PRC), an international event that is held every four years. So we will be kicking off this year’s Peer Review Week celebrations with a panel session immediately after the Congress closes, at 5.30pm on September 12. Under the Microscope: Transparency in Peer Review, which I’m delighted to be chairing, will be open for all PRC attendees to join in person, as well as being live-streamed and recorded so others can also participate (register here for free).
To whet your appetites and encourage you to join us there or follow the proceedings online, we invited the four speakers to share their initial thoughts on what transparent peer review means to them and why it’s important. Irene Hames (independent peer review and publication ethics expert), Elizabeth Moylan (BioMed Central), Andrew Preston (Publons), and Carly Strasser (Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation) bring an interesting range of perspectives to the discussion, as you can see from their answers to this question. While they all agree on the importance of peer review, there’s divergence around what we mean by transparency in peer review and, critically, how to achieve it. For example, is there an agreed definition of what peer review actually is? Is it really the case that peer review has to be open in order for researchers to get credit for it? And how open should reviews for rejected papers be?
As moderator, I’m remaining neutral on the topic (at least for now!) but I look forward to your comments on this post and warmly invite you to submit additional questions for the panel either here in the comments or on Twitter, using the hashtag #AskPRW – and, of course, to join the discussion on September 12.
