Executive Director, Laure Haak, kicked off ORCID’s celebrations for Peer Review Week (September 28 – October 2) with a presentation on Surfacing Peer Review at the Technology Trends Seminar in Wellington, New Zealand today. The talk focused on building a trust framework and incentives for participation and the enabling role of digital identifiers in peer review workflows.
ORCID has an important role in supporting peer review, by enabling verified connections between identifiers for reviewers, affiliations, and reviews. ORCID iDs are being collected in research information systems from grant applications to manuscript submission. Universities and other employers are starting to assert affiliations with their researchers and students. Together, these connections build trust in digital information. With the imminent introduction of our new peer review functionality, researchers and the organizations they review for will soon have the opportunity to improve trust in this process, too.
Just as importantly, organizations will be able to use this new functionality to acknowledge peer review activity. Such recognition is an important step in providing incentives for researchers to participate in peer review. A Sense About Science survey indicates that most researchers don’t expect to be rewarded for their peer review activities, but they would like to be recognized for them. Of interest are initial findings by Publons, a platform for managing peer review, that indicate an increased interest in peer reviewing by researchers who are recognized for their activities.
Building trust in and enabling recognition for peer review in this way isn’t without its challenges. It requires peer review activities to be associated with identifiers—for the reviewer, the activity itself, and the reviewer affiliation – and for connections between these identifiers to be authenticated. Wotk underway by Publons and other early adopters of ORCID functionalty show that these challenges are not insurmountable.
Laure’s talk may have been our first official activity this week, but it certainly isn’t the last! We have a week of blog posts on peer review planned, and Laure is also participating in a free webinar on Trust and Transparency in Peer Review on October 1. Plus there’ll be plenty happening on Twitter, of course (#peerrevwk15). So, watch this space…