Peer Review and the Future of Publishing: Insights from Scholarly Journal Editors
/by Amy King
KGL Editorial recently interviewed five scholarly journal editors and publishing experts on the unique aspects they consider in their peer review process. These publishing professionals generously shared their experiences in the spirit of Peer Review Week, which both inspires innovation and new initiatives and evokes camaraderie in their common challenges. All five individuals shared at least one unique aspect of their peer review model with us.
Jeremy Chapman, Editor-in-Chief of Transplantation and Transplantation Direct, utilizes a large number of board members to perform peer reviews. He noted, “If you haven't peer reviewed papers, you're not going to be a good author. And people know that. Once you've peer reviewed other people's work and analyze that work, you really understand that there are certain features that you haven't put into your paper that you expect to be there, and so you're a better author. So my argument for peer reviewers is if you want to be a better author, do the peer review.”
Zara Manwaring, Managing Editor, Portland Press, has contended with a high volume of over-the-transom, “minimal publishing unit” submissions. High numbers of submissions can become overwhelming to publishing staff and peer reviewers alike. She shared, “A lot of our concerns were about the validity of the data that we were receiving from our authors, because we were often seeing duplicated images. And how do you determine what's inappropriate duplication and what's not? Or whether something's accidental or whether it's deliberate? So, we began requesting raw data from our authors.”
Sarah McCormack, Director of Scholarly Publications, American Nutrition Society, has implemented a statistical review board for her journals. She noted, “We have our editorial boards for our journals who often serve as reviewers on manuscripts, and a few of them were dedicated to statistics, a small handful per journal. We found that they were often overburdened and had to quit for workload reasons. But we also found that the field of statistics is so wide that our associate editors, who are experts in nutrition, weren't able to keep up with it. Often they didn't know the appropriate person to invite to review novel statistics on a manuscript because they are experts in nutrition, not statistics. So there was this real gap of information for who to invite to review statistics for a paper, but also getting people to say yes. Statisticians are in high demand, very busy.”
Dr. Leonard Jack, Jr., Editor-in-Chief, Preventing Chronic Disease, is well-known for growing and diversifying his journal’s editorial board. He shared, “One of the things that helped me to think about why it was necessary to diversify the editorial board was when we took some time to sort of step back and think about: what's the purpose, the focus, the mission and vision for the journal? And very simply, we want to disseminate content that is going to position researchers, evaluators, practitioners, policymakers to actually improve the conditions, circumstances, outcomes of Americans, all people. And if we think about it, if that is the goal, then we need to have representation on our editorial board that reflects that.”
Finally, Tim Beardsley, Executive Editor, Endocrine Society, described what his executive editor role entails and how it provides direction for the peer review process. He said, “We'll normally always go to external reviewers, but the first choice of external reviewers is the editorial board because they are, if you like, pledged to review when they possibly can, they usually say yes. […] We have some absolutely remarkable editorial board members, people who've reviewed many times and have never complained and just keep on reviewing at a phenomenal rate. So, completely extraordinary people.”
For many more helpful insights, lessons, and experiences on peer review from these important conversations, click here to watch the videos! Full-length interview videos coming soon! Keep up to date by subscribing here.
To participate in Peer Review Week, visit: peerreviewweek.wordpress.com/events-and-activities-2023
Amy King is Senior Managing Editor at KGL Editorial where she provides oversight of several client journals, working closely with editors, publishers, and editorial associates. She has nearly 15 years of experience in scholarly publishing. Amy can be reached at info@kwglobal.com.