Peer Review Week: updates since 2016!

By Tom Sharp on September 11, 2017

Here at IOP Publishing it’s been a busy year since the last Peer Review Week! We announced several initiatives this time last year and we thought it was about time we gave you an update.

Publons now live on all journals

Since integrating all our IOP owned journal with Publons at the end of 2016, we have seen over 4,000 reviewers register almost 14,000 reviews with Publons, with an additional 1,500 being added every month. Publons is a free service which enables reviewers to track, verify and showcase their peer review contributions. By partnering with Publons, IOP Publishing reviewers can seamlessly have their reviewer records updated in Publons with the click of a button, without compromising anonymity or peer review policy.

Reviewer Awards announced in February

Based on the reviews conducted in 2016, we announced our list of top reviewers of the year in February. Selected for the quality, quantity and timeliness of their reviews, each journal chose their best reviewers to receive an award. Check out the full list here.

Double-blind peer review offered on two of our journals

Following author feedback, we made the decision last year to offer authors the choice of single or double-blind peer review on two of our journals, Biomedical Physics & Engineering Express and Materials Research Express. To date about 20% of submitting authors have selected this option, with most saying they felt it would give them a fairer review. We’re presenting the early results of this at the Peer Review Congress in Chicago this week.

Signed up to the ORCID open letter

Back in July we announced we have signed up to the ORCID Open Letter, committing to collecting ORCID iDs for authors submitting to our journals. The identifiers are already being displayed on articles where we have them, and from 11^th September all IOP owned journals (excluding Physics Education) has ORCID ID as a required field for submitting authors. We hope this ensures researchers are correctly recognised for their work and that the community is able to cite work without confusion.