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  description: Data driven blogging from the GigaScience editors
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date: '2015-10-01T00:00:00+00:00'
date_updated: '2025-12-06T10:34:54+00:00'
guid: http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/gigablog/?p=1599
identifier: https://doi.org/10.59350/jmbej-hyv88
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summary: '**That Was The Review Week That Was **If you''ve seen the #peerrevwk15 hashtag
  on social media, you may have noticed this week is the first ever Peer Review Week.'
title: '#peerrevwk15 News: Crediting our Amazing Reviewers with DOIs'
url: https://wayback.archive-it.org/22098/2025-05-01T17:13:42Z/http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/peerrevwk15-news-crediting-amazing-reviewers-dois
version: v1
---

\*\*That Was The Review Week That Was\
\*\*[![Screen Shot 2015-09-30 at
16.06.55](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Screen-Shot-2015-09-30-at-16.06.55-228x300.png){.alignleft
.size-medium .wp-image-1600 loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Screen-Shot-2015-09-30-at-16.06.55-228x300.png 228w, http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Screen-Shot-2015-09-30-at-16.06.55.png 526w"
sizes="(max-width: 228px) 100vw, 228px" width="228"
height="300"}](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Screen-Shot-2015-09-30-at-16.06.55.png)If
you\'ve seen the
[\#peerrevwk15](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=news&q=%23peerrevwk15&src=typd){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} hashtag on social media, you may have noticed this week
is the [first ever Peer Review
Week](http://blog.publons.com/celebrating-peer-review-week-2015/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}. Like [Open Access
Week](http://openaccessweek.org/){target="_blank" rel="noopener"} in a
few weeks time (watch this space for some events we\'ll be participating
in) this is a great opportunity to throw some light on what goes on
\"under the hood\" in academic publishing, as well as encourage
innovation and uptake of more open and transparent research practices.

As transparency is a key part of our reproducibility and openness drive
we are big fans of open peer review, and are also keen experimenters and
early adopters of many of the novel platforms and schemes trying to
update and improve upon this fundamental but imperfect system of
assessing academic research. We\'ve written [much in this
blog](http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/gigablog/tag/peer-review/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} on our policies and experiences with open peer review,
and have summarized much of it in an [editorial we published in
2013](http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2047-217X-2-1){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}. Since then we\'ve continued to learn from and adapt our
policies, collaborating with
[Publons](https://publons.com/){target="_blank" rel="noopener"} and
[AcademicKarma](http://academickarma.org/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} (see the interviews with [Andrew Preston of
Publons](http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/gigablog/2014/07/03/gigascience-making-open-peer-review-more-open-qa-with-publons-co-founder-andrew-preston/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} and [Lachlan Coin of
AcademicKarma](http://biome.biomedcentral.com/academic-karma-way-get-credit-peer-review/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}), and being featured journals for both. Peer review week
is the perfect time for an update on where we are, and we have a few
announcements to make on policy and technical changes to this process.

\*\*I Believe That Open Peer Review is the Future.\
\*\*We don\'t need to say too much on the benefits of Open Peer Review,
as Mick Watson does a fantastic job in his impassioned critique of
why [anonymous peer review is bad for science
here](https://biomickwatson.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/why-anonymous-peer-review-is-bad-for-science/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, and the arguments against it regarding reviewers being
more fearful of criticism have been [successfully
debunked](http://www.bmj.com/content/318/7175/23.long){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} by the reams of data from the many medical journals like
*BMJ* and the *BMC Series* medical journals that have been carrying out
open review for over decade and half. There are slight costs in terms of
time of review (less than a day), and the numbers of reviewers per paper
you need to invite (BMC has great data showing it is 5% harder to find
reviewers), but we think the benefits in much better quality reviews far
out weight the overheads. With [PLOS
announcing](http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2015/05/01/plos-one-update-peer-review-investigation/)
they were moving *PLOS ONE*, the worlds largest journal, toward more
transparent peer review this will be a major step to it becoming the
norm. For more conservative journals that still haven\'t discovered the
benefits, the fact that over 45,000 reviewers have taken matters into
their own hands and [posted their reviews on the Publons
platform](https://publons.com/){target="_blank" rel="noopener"} means
that they will become increasingly open review journals whether they
want to or not.

Updating where we are since the Editorial, there was a slight setback
with [BMC changing some of their
policies](http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2015/03/24/confidentiality-versus-transparency-publishers-dilemma/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} and removing some of the pre-publication information
from our records, but we are now capturing all of these missing links
and putting them in a public Editor\'s comment (see this [pre-pub
history](http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/4/1/20/prepub){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} for example). Thanks to our integration with the Publons
platform we are also including all of this information in our [Publons
review
pages](https://publons.com/journal/530/gigascience){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}. As only two reviewers to date have asked to be
anonymous on their reports, we have now removed our option to opt-out of
named peer review and are updating our reviewer instructions to state
so. We are also encouraging reviewers to follow the peer-review oath,
and are updating our reviewer instructions at the same time. If you have
seen in [our
editorial](http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/4/1/32) in July we
are also trialling a more detailed reproducibility checklist, and
reviewers are asked to specifically check a number of points and to
confirm the information has been satisfactorily reported and reviewed.

\*\*Data Reviews Are Coming. You Review and you DOI.\
\*\*Our reviewers are fantastic, and on top of making their efforts more
transparent we feel it is important to give them some form of formal
credit for the hard work they do. Thanks to our partners at
[Publons](https://publons.com/){target="_blank" rel="noopener"} and
[Datacite](https://www.datacite.org/node){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} we can now do this by assigning DOIs to all our peer
review. This makes them searchable on via the many sources that index
this such as [DataCite metadata
search](http://search.labs.datacite.org/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, The Thomson Reuters [Data Citation
Index](http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/multidisciplinary/dci/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, and the [OSF Share registry](https://osf.io/share/?).
We\'ve manually added DOIs to resolve to the [over 300 reviews we
currently have in
Publons](https://publons.com/journal/530/gigascience){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, and have now created a pipeline using the Publons and
DataCite APIs to automate this process. If any other publishers wish to
reuse and build upon this functionality we have made it available [via
our GitHub repository](https://github.com/gigascience/gigasci-publons).
As with the Mozilla/ORCID/BMC/Ubiquity [Contributorship badges
project](https://www.mozillascience.org/contributorship-badges-for-science-view-them-now){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} just [announced this
week](http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/gigablog/2015/09/28/putting-credit-hands-researchers/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} that we are participating in, we are keen to
disambiguate and credit the different roles in the research cycle.
Having citable DOIs for our GigaDB hosted datasets allows researchers to
add them to their ORCID profiles, and a new feature we are integrating
in our GigaDB entries is to highlight and link the DOIs to any datasets
that have been peer reviewed in conjunction to a *GigaScience* article.
You can see an [example
here](http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/100108){target="_blank" rel="noopener"}
with the DOIs to the reviews linked from the Additional information
section, and in the next version of the database they will be more
prominently highlighted.

[![Slide1](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Slide1.jpg){.aligncenter
.size-full .wp-image-1601 loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Slide1.jpg 720w, http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Slide1-300x225.jpg 300w"
sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" width="720"
height="540"}](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Slide1.jpg)Our
reviewers continue to amaze us with the cutting edge ways they interact
with our data-heavy and computationally complicated papers, and without
prompting we\'ve seen them blogging their reviews in a [real-time open
peer
review](http://biome.biomedcentral.com/assemblathon-2-unusual-meta-peer-review/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} process, and even [posting them on
GitHub](https://gist.github.com/stain/a107379fc1adbb3e392b){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, and [posting pull
requests](https://github.com/Viant-Metabolomics/Galaxy-M/pull/1){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} as part of the process. Making all our peer reviews
[open and CC-BY by
default](http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/gigablog/2013/12/19/gigascience-goes-cc4-a-handy-cut-out-and-keep-guide-to-our-licenses/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, we\'ve also been surprised by how many people read them
from popular papers. With much work to follow from the many working
groups tackling standards and practices for peer review, and our
collaborations with Publons and others, we will continue to adapt and
improve upon this process, so keep following this blog to see how it
develops.

The post [\#peerrevwk15 News: Crediting our Amazing Reviewers with
DOIs](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/peerrevwk15-news-crediting-amazing-reviewers-dois/){rel="nofollow"}
appeared first on
[GigaBlog](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog){rel="nofollow"}.