A working group established in 2014 by ORCID, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing a registry of unique and persistent identifiers for researchers, and F1000Research, an open science publishing platform for life scientists, looked to find a way to ensure researcher peer review activities are properly acknowledged as a fundamental contribution to research.
Partnering with the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (CASRAI), the working group has created a peer review activity data profile, which defines a standard field set, and established business rules that will work across the many types of peer review used in publishing, funding, university research management, and conference presentations.
"Peer review is an essential part of the research process", said Laure Haak, ORCID Executive Director. "Our goal at ORCID has been to help build infrastructure to surface all contributions a researcher makes. We are looking forward to co-releasing peer review functionality with F1000 and our other early adopter partners."
Several organizations are already set to adopt this peer review citation standard when collecting, storing, and exchanging peer review information:
- F1000 is planning to implement the new review citation data model to post validated review activity to reviewer ORCID records via their platform, and work with their partners to facilitate integration into conference review workflows.
- American Geophysical Union, working with eJournalPress, are planning to implement a workflow to collect ORCID iDs for their reviewers and post validated review activity to reviewer ORCID records using the new data standard.
- The APSA's Politics and Religion journal is planning to collect ORCID iDs for its reviewers.
- Peerage of Science plans to integrate ORCID and the review citation standard into its new Reviewer Profiles feature.
- Europe PubMedCentral plans to display reviewer information and links to open reviews.
Rebecca Lawrence, Managing Director of F1000Research, said: "The formal but completely transparent peer review process post-publication, used on both the F1000Prime article recommendation service and on articles published in F1000Research, provides us with the opportunity to maximize the credit we can give back to our referees for the often significant time and effort required to produce a good peer review - work that typically remains invisible.
"Enabling referees to both be able to cite their often lengthy referee reports, as well as include them on lists of their outputs such as ORCID records, is a major step forward in properly recognizing this activity that is essential for the advancement of scientific understanding."
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For more information:
Andrew Baud, Tala (on behalf of the working group), +44 (0) 20 3397 3383 or andrew.baud@teamtala.com.
Notes to editors:
F1000 (f1000.com) is a community of more than 10,000 biomedical experts who help scientists to discover, discuss and publish research. F1000 offers: F1000Research - an open science publishing platform for life scientists that offers immediate publication and transparent peer review, avoiding editorial bias and ensuring the inclusion of all source data.
F1000Prime - a service which identifies and recommends important articles in biology and medical research publications.
F1000Workspace - a new research collaboration, reference management and authoring platform for scientists.
Contact: Rebecca Lawrence, rebecca.lawrence@f1000.com. ORCID (orcid.org) is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing a registry of unique and persistent identifier for researchers, and to working with the community to embed these identifiers in research workflows. Our goal is to provide a seamless and low-burden means to connect researchers with their contributions and affiliations. Contact: Laure Haak, l.haak@orcid.org. CASRAI (casrai.org) The Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (CASRAI) is an international non-profit dedicated to reducing the administrative burden on researchers and improving business intelligence capacity of research institutions and funders. Contact: David Baker, dbaker@casrai.org.