Peer Review Week 2021 takes place September 20-24, with this year’s featured theme — “Identity in Peer Review” — dedicated to exploring the multifaceted nature of identity, how personal and social identity affects peer review practices and experiences, and what’s needed to foster more diverse, equitable, and inclusive peer review processes.
To mark the occasion, Dr Mario Malički, Co-Editor-in-Chief ofResearch Integrity and Peer Review，，，，在同行评审中分享了他关于身份的想法和问题。
Supporting diversity
As an editor, I would like to create and support an inclusive culture of peer review.
我必须首先宣布我的学术研究重点是同行评审，而不是身份，多样性或包容性。在我的一些已发表研究中，分析我的同事和我进行了探索结果的关联或对职业阶段，性别，统计专业知识或个人或个人状态的影响的关联，但就我的研究或专业知识而言，这是我的研究或专业知识主题走了。作为编辑，我想创建并支持同行评审的包容性文化。但是，我不确定作者，读者，审稿人以及更广泛的公共和科学界如何希望我们或其他期刊展示或实施多样性实践。这意味着，作为一项步骤，我必须计划与有关方面的调查和对话，以发现这一点（此博客是该策略的一部分）。对于下面的段落中的许多问题，我不得不提前表示歉意。不过，我希望他们能激发经验的分享。
期刊目标和衡量关于什么s to identity in peer review?
以前的案例显示了可疑的自我引文或期刊引用堆叠模式的案例 - 我们如何确保这不会发生在多样性指标上？
在涉及同伴评论者时，是否应为代表性期刊的具体配额，例如，性别或性认同的特定比率，职业阶段，收入，机构，国家，国家或州，宗教，种族，种族，（子）文化，多学科，多阶级学科，，残疾等？（例如，请参阅Lancet’s commitmentto have 35% women reviewers, and 50% women in editorial boards,BMJ’sandHorizon 2020 Advisory Groupscommitment of gender equity, and an analysis of diversity in USAacademia）。
How should editors help achieve those goals? Should they find reviewers that check several of the diversity identifiers at the same time? Should they make sure that the reviewers don’t feel they are primarily being invited to fulfil a quota? Should editors have a list of reviewers that are happy to be invited to fulfil those quotas? Can editors be sure that if they collect this information from reviewers (or authors and editorial board members), that their publishers’ system and their computers are impeccably protected, so that that information, protected by GDPR, will not be hacked or misused? Will reviewers even want to share that information?
How should editors inquire about it? And how should they search for reviewers based upon those characteristics (e.g.,Publons评论员数据库and other bibliographic databases at best contain only affiliation information)? Should diversity of reviewers be achieved for each manuscript, or will stakeholders “accept” if they apply overall, e.g., summary indicators for all manuscripts submitted in 1 year, or over journals lifetime? How will editors balance between required expertise and set goals? If a public diversity database of journals’ identity indicators is made one day (akin to负责任的社论政策平台， 或者Sherpa/Romeo对于预印政策），what will be counted? For example, if an editor invites 2 men and 2 women to review, and only 2 men accept – will the initial intention to cover sex equity be valued? Will editors manipulate this – and invite those they know will reject the invites? Or even go so far to have agreements with them that they reject reviews? Previous cases have shown cases of suspiciousself-citation or citation stackingpatterns of journals – how do we ensure this does not happen to diversity indicators? Should journals have mechanisms to enable authors to express preferences or raise concerns about diversity of their reviewers? And if disagreements about them occur, how should they be resolved and by whom? Recommendations and updates from theJoint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishingmight soon help answer some of these questions.
Should articles have diversity statements?
Should journals expand declaration sections so that alongside data sharing statements, ethics approvals, conflicts of interests, etc., they also have a diversity section – which would be filled out by authors during submission – and in which they would declare if they considered diversity when they were conducting their study and in analysing their data? Or if they followedSex and Gender Equity in Research – SAGER guidelines， 或者医学和科学期刊中种族和种族报告的指南? Should a lack of such considerations warrant study rejections? Can editors and reviewers help those questions be considered during study planning, at least for study protocols or registered reports submitted to their journals (see for example aproposed checklist研究人员可以使用对性敏感和性别敏感的研究）？期刊也可能将这些主题视为审查的标准，它们可能会在提交模板中强制使用（如某些期刊and资助者已经做到了）。多样性部分是否应该包括期刊和审稿人的声明，对多样性方面进行了审查？编辑和审阅者将需要得到什么样的培训（公开）？
如何决定什么时候和与身份initiatives to start with?
我们仍是lacking studies that show effectiveness of intervention to improve the quality of peer review, or even those that say how we should measure the quality of peer review.
编辑可能会等待，直到对出色质量和普遍性的身份和多样性研究开始，然后才开始实施或剥夺实施身份政策和实践。例如，关于145的实践的最新研究期刊，，，，has indicated that “peer review and editorial processes do not penalize manuscripts by women”. Can editors trust that these findings apply to their own journals and not prioritize asking orpredicting/determining作者的性别，而是专注于实现同行评审的性别平等？编辑是否应归功于作者和审稿人在自己的期刊上进行此类研究？还是要找到资源或公开呼吁独立研究人员确认这些发现？编辑人应该首先实施哪些动作？他们还应该等待研究表明哪些干预措施有效的研究？我们仍是lackingstudies that show effectiveness of intervention to improve the quality of peer review, or even those that say how we shouldmeasurethe quality of peer review.
RIPR plans and call for studies
Questions can be a start. Our plans as a journal for the next year are to pilot structured peer review (i.e. a mandatory set of questions each peer reviewer needs to answer, e.g.Do additional study limitations need to be listed?），以及两年后的飞行员出版摘要that occurred due to peer review每篇文章。但是，今年的Peer Review Week’sfocus on identity has encouraged us to do more, and we will start by considering the best way to include diversity considerations in the structured review template, and consulting our advisory board on their view on diversity and gender equity goals. Then comes the survey to authors and reviewers. We also plan to run a pilot on comparing reviews of those we invited as editors, and those who respond to a public call for review of a submitted manuscript shared (through Springer NaturesIn Reviewplatform or any preprint server). This can perhaps lead to including or volunteering of those who might feel their voices are not being heard.
Finally, please consider submitting any research on peer review diversity to our journal. So much of our work as editors is voluntary, and we lack resources to do all we would want – so please share with us your experiences and interventions you found were (easily) implemented or that helped you achieve your identity, diversity and inclusion goals. And if you are interested in running analyses on our or many other journals that use open peer review, please be in touch via the ‘Contact Us’ link onEditorial Manager。
Disclaimer: I would like to thank colleagues and friends who commented and improved my initial draft considerably, including (in first-name alphabetical order): Ana Jerončić, Anton Ninkov, Bahar Mehmani, Gerben ter Riet, IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Jadranka Stojanovski, Lazaros Belbasis, Lex Bouter, Peter Steenbergen
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