At major computer-science publication venues, up to 17% of the peer reviews are now written by artificial intelligence. We need guidelines before things get out of hand. (5 Nov 2024) Since the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT was released in late 2022, computer scientists have noticed a troubling trend: chatbots are increasingly used to…
(25 Sep 2024) As Peer Review Week kicks off, STM is excited to announce the launch of the Peer Review Terminology website—a new resource designed to bring greater clarity, consistency, and transparency to the peer review process. Created through a partnership between STM and NISO, this initiative reflects our shared mission to enhance scholarly communication and streamline research…
(14 Sep 2024) A University of California Los Angeles neuroscience professor has sued six major academic journal publishers, claiming in a proposed class action that they violated antitrust law by barring simultaneous submissions to multiple journals and denying pay for “peer review” services. Professor Lucina Uddin filed the lawsuit in Brooklyn federal court on Thursday against…
(8 Aug 2024) René Aquarius, a researcher at Radboud University Medical Center, Netherlands, shared her experience on being an reviewer for MDPI journals. “Mid November 2023 I received a request to peer-review a manuscript for a special issue on subarachnoid hemorrhage for the Journal of Clinical Medicine, published by MDPI. This blog post summarizes that…
(24 Nov 2023) This blog post draws insights from a recent installment of Highwire’s Best Practice Webinar Series, featuring a distinguished panel of experts: Fiona Hutton, Head of Publishing at eLife Sciences, Monica Granados from PREreview; and Boris Barbour from PubPeer. The webinar delved into the future of peer review by exploring community and third-party…
(14 Jul 2023) On 23 June, NIH banned the use of online generative AI tools like ChatGPT “for analyzing and formulating peer-review critiques”—likely spurred in part by a letter from Siegle, who is at the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues. After the conference they warned the agency that allowing ChatGPT to write grant reviews is “a…
(5 Jul 2023) The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of the Peer Review Terminology Standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023), which will support open research by simplifying the communication of peer review roles and practices and fostering greater transparency in the peer review process. Peer review is universally acknowledged as critical to the research…
(20 Oct 2022) Open access publisher eLife has announced it will no longer make accept or reject decisions following peer review. From the end of January, eLife will instead publish every paper it reviews as a “reviewed preprint”, which it describes as “a new type of research output that combines the manuscript with eLife’s detailed peer reviews and a concise…
A Nobel prizewinner is six times more likely than someone less well known to get a thumbs-up for acceptance, finds study. (11 Oct 2022) As a journal editor, Palan wanted to check on the impact of double-anonymized review in his journal. He approached Nobel prizewinner Vernon Smith to see whether he had a paper in the…
(1 Feb 2022) Clarivate Analytics, the UK-based firm that owns the scholarly database Web of Science (WoS), has begun automatically generating author profiles, including information about peer-review activity for researchers whose papers are indexed on the database. The peer-review information will be integrated from early 2022. It will come primarily from Publons, a free-to-use website…