Celebrating Peer Review Week at SAGE

By Katrina Pickersgill

Now in its fifth year, Peer Review Week is an annual event that showcases the essential role that reviewers play in the curation and dissemination of academic research. Each year has a theme and this year’s is “Quality in Peer Review”. With research output hitting an all-time high in 2018 the demand on reviewers is more significant than ever. It is therefore vital that the right training, recognition and rewards are in place to ensure that meaningful and helpful peer reviews can be shared with authors.

With peer review teams in our UK, US & India offices SAGE is once again having a busy year with all things peer review. In March we kicked off our trial on Open Peer Review. Through the publication of review comments we hope to increase transparency and accountability, assist in the training of Early Career Researchers and provide another way for reviewers to obtain credit for their valuable work.

In April, we were thrilled to mark over 65,000 SAGE reviewers on Publons. With over 950 SAGE journals now integrated, it is quick and easy for the majority of our reviewers to obtain the recognition they deserve. We are also pleased to recommend the Publons Academy, a peer review training course for early career researchers.

We once again supported the ‘Peer Review: Nuts and Bolts” workshop hosted by Sense About Science in June, with SAGE Managing Editor Pete Chapman as a panellist, and we have contributed to the revised edition of the accompanying Nuts and Bolts guide (coming soon!).

We are also delighted to have formed a new Research Integrity Group at SAGE, who will continue to ensure the highest standards of ethics and transparency in what and how we publish journal content.

We are proud to have continued our involvement with the Peer Review Week Organising Committee in 2019, and we will be celebrating this week with a series of blog posts on topics such as research ethics, reviewer education and top reviewer selection tips for Editors. We will also be hosting an internal event on peer review innovation at our London office.

Make sure you visit the Peer Review Week Youtube channel for thought pieces on why peer review is important and what quality review looks like. You can also follow the conversation on social media using the hashtags #PeerRevWk19 and #QualityinPeerReview.

Have a great Peer Review Week!