A number of publishers and funders have been integrating ORCID identifiers into their review workflows. They are now asking us how to post review activity information to ORCID records. We are pleased to announce a community collaboration, co-chaired by ORCID and F1000 Research and managed by CASRAI, to help us answer that question. Organizations represented on the working group are Autism Speaks, Denison University, Journal of Politics and Religion, Cambridge University Press, American Geophysical Union, ISMTE, Origin Editorial, Sideview, University of Split, and Hypothes.is.
Researchers can spend many hours in a grant review session or in reviewing journals or books. The quality of this review service is critical for the research process, and in particular for establishing trustworthiness in scholarly communications. In addition, participation in review panels seems to help researchers to succeed in grant writing. However, peer review activities are virtually unacknowledged. Most journals will provide a listing of reviewers in a single edition of their publication, but this is not a citable resource. Funders may provide a stipend, but no public acknowlegement that an individual has participated in a review panel. There are also many other types of activities that could be considered as peer review, such as blue ribbon panels, expert testimony, abstract review, degree supervisions, and more.
Increasingly, the community is asking how such service may be better recognized, both to encourage participation but also to be able to evaluate impact of review service on career development. The question is, how best to accomodate the broad variety of peer review activities and products in a common citation standard. And, from our perspective at ORCID, does it make sense to post peer review activity information if there is no persistent identifier or resolvable (open) document to link to an ORCID identifier?
Some journals are starting to develop open peer review approaches where the reviewers and their comments are published alongside a paper. For example, F1000 Research collects reviewer ORCID iDs and has started to obtain DOIs for these review reports. They would like to post activity information to ORCID upon completion.
Other organizations using double-blind review processes have a different acknowledgement use case. They store reviews and links with papers and grants internally, and are collecting reviewer ORCID identifiers. They would like to post summary information to ORCID that would state that a person has completed “x” number of reviews with journal or panel “y” in a particular year. They do not plan on including information on the particular paper or grant that was reviewed.
Organizations using either type of peer review process are interested in the potential for posting commendations along with the acknowledgement, for researchers or scholars who provide exceptional reviews.
With all of these requirements, the CASRAI Working Group has a lot to consider, not the least of which is, are reviews a “work” activity, or a service? The answer could have an impact on how such activity is valued in promotion reviews and possibly also in altmetrics calculations. So, no pressure!
The group will be reviewing data field requirements for citation and data exchange and workflows for associating the review and reviewer with persistent identifiers. They are scheduled to submit draft recommendations to an external review circle in June, prior to finalizing their report. CASRAI will be translating the group’s recommendations into fully defined record-types, fields, and classifications to be added to the CASRAI dictionary for open use by the community. ORCID will be using the group’s recommendations to develop methods for linking review activities with ORCID identifiers and for posting review metadata to the ORCID Registry. For a complete list of group members, please see the CASRAI website.
If you are interested in joining the Review Circle for this project, please contact CASRAI at [email protected].
