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Peer review can be a confusing process at times and so to help cut out all the jargon and make it as simple as possible, we have developed the ‘Peer Review Experts’ blog series. Each week we’ll be bringing you top tips on a wide range of peer review subjects, straight from the experts; our very own peer-review team at F1000Research. This week, Charlie Vickers, Senior Editorial Assistant at F1000Research is talking about the benefits of co-reviewing.

As an early career researcher, reviewing your first article can be a daunting task and it is important to get it right. If it also happens to be open peer review, this means that your work will be on show for all to see. One of the best ways to share the workload is to collaborate with a colleague who already has some experience of peer review, by co-reviewing the article together. 

Co-reviewing is one of the benefits made possible by open peer review, since all reviewers can claim credit for their work when providing peer review reports. This encourages co-reviewing, something which we at F1000Research believe is very important.

Covering all bases

Scientific research is becoming more in-depth and interdisciplinary, with more complex methods being used in both in primary research and the meta-analyses. With this in mind, we realise that a reviewer may not be able to cover all the areas of an article they are asked to review (Check out our blog on knowing when to accept a review). We always ask that reviewers state their expertise on our reviewer forms for this reason, as it is published underneath their report and allows readers to appreciate where their area of expertise lies.  

When a reviewer can’t review all areas of an article, they are encouraged to find colleagues they wish to review alongside, who will be able to evaluate different aspects so that the resulting report is more comprehensive. This is quite commonly seen on review reports, where the article contains a lot of statistical analysis or unfamiliar methods.

At F1000, we power several other publishing platforms, running them exactly the same way as F1000Research, but these are often exclusively for funders, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. On one of these platforms, Wellcome Open Research, you can see a very good example of co-reviewing in action

Getting your name out there

Open peer review reduces the amount of ghostwriting going on in peer review. With the number of articles being published worldwide increasing each year, and no such increase in the numbers of available reviewers (according to a much-cited Publons report), early career researchers are likely to play a very important role in the peer review process over the coming years.

With co-reviewing also encouraged and formally recognised, more experienced reviewers may ask their colleagues in the lab to go over it with them and help them gain an understanding of what is expected from a peer review report. This may have been happening previously, but as peer review was closed there is no way of knowing how extensive this is, and no way for early career researchers to claim credit for their work. A recent study (currently a preprint hosted by BioRxiv) surveying early career researchers found that many of them have co-reviewed articles and found it to be a beneficial form of peer review training. Furthermore, half of those surveyed had ghost-written a peer review report and therefore not received any recognition for their contribution at all. At F1000Research a co-reviewer’s name is always published alongside their more experienced colleague on the report they have helped write, which is published next to the article they have reviewed.

Peering into the future

As open peer review becomes more common throughout the science community, we believe that co-reviewing will (and definitely should) become the norm. With the examples discussed here, we think this can only be seen as a good thing.  

If you’re interested in reviewing for F1000Research and would like to know more please click the following link for our reviewer guidelines: https://f1000research.com/for-referees/guidelines.