ORCID has provided peer review functionality for going on three years. Peer review recognition is part of our broader commitment to improve recognition for all research contributions. It’s something that reviewers feel strongly about too. In Publons’ recently published 2018 Global State of Peer Review survey, 85% of respondents indicated that peer review contributions should be both required and recognized by their institutions; and 83% indicated that greater recognition and career incentives for peer review would have a positive effect on the community.
We continue to improve our peer review functionality based on your feedback. Review activities now group in an ORCID record based on a shared group ID and review identifier, much as works do. If your organization asserts reviews directly on ORCID records and also provides review history to other parties, such as review recognition services, you can share the group ID and review identifier you use to ensure that the review correctly groups on the ORCID record.
A new way to recognize review service
In 2017, we called on the ORCID community to help us expand our affiliations section to better encompass the range of professional activities researchers engage in. The new affiliations are being launched this month in the ORCID record interface and will also be available to ORCID member organizations testing the first release candidate of our API 3.0.
Service, one of the six new affiliations on the ORCID record, recognizes any donation of a researcher’s time, time, money, or other resources to an organization or community, including voluntary work such as being a review editor or participating in a review panel. It can be used in combination with peer review activity to provide a more complete recognition of the total review contribution of a researcher.
Each service affiliation requires information about the service organization, including its organization identifier; and information about the duration of service, including the date it started. We also recommend adding more detail about the organization, such as the name of the journal or panel where the review service was performed, and the role of the reviewer or their title, for example Review Editor or Review Committee Chair.
Users will be able to add information themselves about their service to an organization as a reviewer, review editor, and more, directly in their ORCID record. ORCID member organizations testing API 3.0 will be able to add these service affiliations with their researchers’ permission.
Uptake in peer review on ORCID
Now that our API 2.0 is in full use,all ORCID members are able to use the peer review functionality; usage has increased significantly as a result. More than 25 thousand ORCID records now have at least one peer review — a 133% increase over 2017. And more than 535,500 peer reviews have now been asserted on ORCID records, a 266% increase over the 148,100 reviews posted in 2017. Publons continue to be responsible for the vast majority (512,700), but assertions by other organizations are increasing rapidly. See our chart below for more details and the statistics page for the latest updates:
| September 2017 | September 2018 | |
| Number of iDs with peer reviews | 10,837 | 25,210 (+132.63%) |
| Number of peer review items | 148,060 | 535,472 (+261.66%) |
| Visible to everyone | 124,709 | 451,778 |
| Visible to trusted parties | 5,660 | 24,110 |
| Visible to only the user | 17,691 | 59,584 |
| Number of peer review groups | 10,108 | 18,442 (+82.45%) |
| Number of unique DOIs | 6,948 | 12,718 (+83.05%) |
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Top five organizations posting peer reviews (number of reviews posted) |
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Organizations currently asserting reviews directly are predominately using third-party systems, with an even split between F1000’s Open Research platform and eJournalPress. Other systems which currently support peer review assertions directly to ORCID records include Aries Systems’ Editorial Manager and River Valley Technologies’ ReView.
We are delighted to see our community making more use of our peer review functionality and hope to see uptake continue to increase in the coming months and years.
