PLOS Peer Review Toolkit
Further reading
Congratulations, you made it to the end of the essentials series and a well earned break! We’ve covered the history of peer review, types of peer review, got some tips from the editors and learned how to read critically and write peer reviews. Need a recap? Review the essentials series.

We’ll be taking a break, but we’ll be back in 2019 with more advice, tips and guidance. Want more? Check out the suggested reading and let us know your thoughts!

Now it’s time you hear from you, in issue #1 we gave you a brief history of peer review, and asked you to tell us what comes next.
We listened
Crystal ball
Where do YOU think peer review is headed?
 
I think that peer review is destined to become more open with less blind reviewing, I think opening this up will make for more robust reviews that are respectful of authors but also acknowledge the effort of reviewers who dedicate their time.  quote
I think peer review will change from an authoritative claim on the validity of a scientific study towards a collaborative improvement of a scientific study.  quote
I'd like to see more journals where peer review still takes place, but the research is published anyway (as long as it meets some minimum standard), together with the reviews and any reply to them from the authors.  quote
I believe that training for early-career researchers will enable the quality of reviews to improve and that recognition for the contribution of reviewing toward the scientific community will be rewarded better than it is currently.  quote
Types of Peer Review
TH Mallhi
Mutual collaboration...
Peer review is a science of mutual collaboration between authors and referees in which both partners work to defend each others for scientific piece of work.
Tauqeer Hussain Mallhi, Universiti Sains Malaysia
V Tripathi
Published peer review...
It would be great, if we publish the reviewers comment with the article. It gives a very good insight for the community.
Vishnu Tripathi, University of California, United States
Blind peer review or is it?
Blind or not: in my field, we are few, so we practically immediately know who wrote the paper, or we can narrow it down to 2 or 3 people. So the blind review is not really effective. I have never done it, but I think the ‘collaborative’ method sounds really interesting.  ― Anonymous reviewer
M Thakur
Double blind...
I personally believe a double-blind peer review process is positive and provides an unbiased decision, purely based on scientific merits.   Mukesh Thakur, Zoological Survey of India, India
Read more
The Global Burden of Journal Peer Review in the Biomedical Literature: Strong Imbalance in the Collective Enterprise Kovanis M, Porcher R, Ravaud P, Trinquart L.
This research article uses mathematical modeling to estimate the annual demand for peer review. It also establishes how work is currently divided, with 20% of reviewers completing 69%-94% of all reviews.
Reviewer Fatigue? Why Scholars Decline to Review their Peers’ Work Breuning M, Backstrom J, Brannon J, Gross B, Widmeier M.
This analysis of the rate at which reviewers accept or decline to review for political journal APSA, finds that reviewer fatigue is only one of a number of reasons why reviewers decline to review. It also finds that women and men are just as likely to accept to review.
Survey on open peer review: Attitudes and experience amongst editors, authors and reviewers Ross-Hellauer T, Deppe A, Schmidt B.
Explore the attitudes of over 3,000 researchers towards different aspects of OPR. 60.3% believe that OPR should be a mainstream scholarly practice, though only 31% believed that open identities would make research better or much better.
Fragments of peer review: A quantitative analysis of the literature (1969-2015) Grimaldo F, Marušić A, Squazzoni F.
This quantitative analysis paper explores the existing research about peer review. ‘we now know a great deal about the mechanics of peer review — the time taken to appraise papers, rates of disagreement between reviewers, the cost at certain journals, even the occurrence of misconduct during review.’
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