We officially launched peer review functionality in ORCID during the first Peer Review Week, nearly two years ago. Members can to connect information about peer review activities to ORCID records, so that it can be shared as needed by the reviewer with their employer, funder, or other organizations. Since then,10 organizations have implemented this functionality, three of whom – American Geophysical Union (AGU), F1000, and Publons – have collectively added review information to 9,800 ORCID records, as of June 2017.
At this year’s Peer Review Congress, I presented data on overall uptake, with an emphasis on the 135,604 review activities added by Publons, which alone comprise 92.8% of the review items added to ORCID records.
To put usage of our peer review functionality into context, we first looked at overall adoption of ORCID by region and discipline, using figures from our 2016 data file provided by Adenike Deane-Pratt, as part of her work on the THOR project. Her analysis, data, and methodology, will be published in full shortly and is summarized in the charts below.
Next we compared this with uptake of the peer review functionality, also by region and discipline, as of June 2017.
As you can see, peer review activities connected with ORCID records follow a broadly similar regional and disciplinary breakdown as overall ORCID adoption – albeit on a very micro scale, with only 0.26% of ORCID registrants connecting review activities to their iD as of end May. Europe has a disproportionately high share of both works and reviews overall – likely due to strong encouragement or in some cases requirement for ORCID iDs at the national level in several countries. Works and review activities added to STEM subjects are also over-represented compared with arts, humanities, and social sciences (AHSS). This is probably partly due to the addition of the American Geophysical Union and F1000 review activities to the Publons numbers (not available by region), but is also a reflection of the fact that there are fewer researchers working in AHSS.
Between June and September, there has been a 10% increase in both the number of connected peer review activities AND the number of ORCID records with at least one peer review item. Of these items, 124,709 (84%) were publicly available, 17,691 (12%) were private, and 5,660 (4%) were available to trusted organizations.
Peer review activities currently represent less than 1% of all ORCID connections. We expect, to see a continued increase in items and connected records as more of our members upgrade to our API 2.0, which supports peer review functionality – whether for reviews of grant applications, promotion and tenure committees, conference abstracts, annotations, books, or of course journals. We are delighted that ORCID members Aries Systems (Editorial Manager) and Clarivate Analytics (ScholarOne) will both be including this functionality in their next releases, due in early 2018, making it available to many of our publisher and association members.
If you’re already planning to implement peer review functionality or are interested in learning more, we’d love to hear from you – please contact us!
