(13 Mar 2019) A new partnership to improve peer review processes is announced today by Publons, a peer review platform and part of the Web of Science Group and Hindawi, an open access publisher.
Hindawi have integrated the new reviewer search service, Publons Reviewer Connect, with their peer review management systems, including review.hindawi.com, their recently launched open source peer review system. The integration will provide Hindawi’s academic editors with the cross-publisher peer review and editorial history of Publons’ 500,000+ strong reviewer community. This month, Reviewer Connect will be implemented across Hindawi’s 231 peer-reviewed journals to support editors with accurate peer review suggestions.
Hindawi also plans to improve review speed and reduce reviewer workloads by integrating Publons’ Reviewer Availability feature, identifying availability constraints at the time of invitation. Hindawi will work to bring about industry-wide improvements in review efficiency by providing availability data to Publons, where reviewers’ privacy choices permit.
Andrew Smeall, Hindawi Chief Digital Officer, commented:
“We believe that publishing options should be driven by researcher satisfaction, rather than tradition. We are committed to working with tools that improve collaboration and reduce the burden publishing places on researchers.
“Publons Reviewer Connect will allow us to enhance our reviewer search capabilities, avoid burdening already overworked reviewers, and increase satisfaction for our Editors, authors and reviewers. We believe Publons’ cross-publisher reviewer availability initiative will be a transformative collaboration bringing greater efficiency to peer review.”
Andrew Preston, Managing Director, Publons, said:
“Our Global State of Peer Review report, sourced from a survey of over 12,000 reviewers and published in September, found reviewer availability to be one of the key inefficiencies in the peer review process. We believe we’ve identified a practical, scalable and immediate means of addressing this problem and are pleased to be partnering with Hindawi so their authors and reviewers can benefit. Improving peer review is our mission, and we hope to achieve this through connections with publishers, so we are proud of the interest our Publons Reviewer Connect has garnered so far.”
Read the press release here.
