PeerJ Partners with Publons – Reviewers Get More Credit

At PeerJ, we have been very impressed with Publons and their innovative approach towards giving Peer-Reviewers due credit for the work they do.

In addition to being a site for the ‘post-publication peer-review’ of articles, Publons also works with publishers to verify their peer-reviewers (and to confirm the fact that they conducted a peer-review). As a result, those individuals are then able to ‘claim’ their reviews at Publons and build up a profile which reflects their verified ‘reviewing activity’ across multiple journals or publishers. This is a unique and interesting solution to the problem of giving appropriate credit to reviewers and is very much in line with the PeerJ philosophy of giving due credit to all.

Therefore, we are very pleased to announce that PeerJ is the first publisher to enter into a formal partnership with Publons to facilitate this process. Although all of our public peer-reviews are reproduced under a CC-BY license (and hence are open for anyone to reuse) we are happy to have a more formal arrangement with Publons to make this happen in an ‘official’ manner.

How Does It Work? Provided the PeerJ peer-reviewer chooses to name themselves (something which ~40% of our reviewers choose to do); and provided the authors of the article also choose to make their review history public (something which ~85% of our authors do), then Publons will take a copy of that public peer-review from our site. We then email the reviewer to inform them that they can ‘claim’ the review at Publons (this is entirely optional – having an account at Publons is completely opt-in).

What Are The Benefits? By registering themselves on the Publons site, individuals are able to add information about reviews they have conducted across different journals or publishers, and in this way build up a comprehensive record of their contribution to the scholarly publication process. At long last, reviewers are able to get credit for the vital, but usually unsung, work they perform across the whole of the scholarly publishing system!

See below, for an example of a profile showing with contributions from more than one publisher.

.