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Peer review. What’s left that has not already been said about peer review? It’s the best system we have. It’s flawed. All of the research community spend time and energy doing it, in the belief that they are contributing to their chosen field.

Here at F1000, one of our objectives is to clean up the peer review process and to make it more transparent. This is true particularly on F1000Research, where reviewers are invited after publication and review is done by named experts and fully in the open. This encourages a constructive conversation between author and reviewer, rather than a closed discussion between reviewer and journal.

F1000Prime, too, operates a form of post publication peer review. Our F1000 expert Faculty recommend research that they have encountered and believe others should be aware of. The service highlights research from over 4,000 journals and the personal recommendations are trusted by academics.

Peer review is not limited to journals, though this blog will focus on that side of review. Grant and conference committees of course review research proposals by academics, and again this is often done behind closed doors.

As our thoughts focus on Peer Review Week and its excellent theme of recognising review, I wonder what better way to recognise review than by encouraging it to happen in the open?

By opening up peer review, reviewers themselves get recognised. Publishing their names and affiliations with their reports alongside the article ensures that their contribution is clear and reports become a part of the article and discussion around it.

Reviewers can see the authors’ responses to their comments, and how an article is subsequently revised. The reviewers truly become part of the publication process and the conversation is between author and reviewer with the focus on helping the authors improving the article.

At F1000Research we also make the referee reports citable in their own right by giving it a DOI, providing visibility to the whole process and enabling reviewers to receive credit for their work. We also track views and usage of each review which is an important indicator of how far the review is contributing to the specific research and science more broadly.  A review can also be added to an ORCID profile, and we encourage our referees to do this.

But how could things change in the future?

The output of journals is growing each year. The STM Report from 2015 suggests that there were 28,100 active scholarly peer reviewed English-language journals in 2014, which published 2.5 million articles in that year. Increasingly, researchers simply don’t have time to stay on top of the literature and rely on technology to find, and increasingly read, articles for them. Much of the literature is not read by researchers, and we know that reviewers may often by the only people who truly ‘read’ many articles.

Open peer review provides another route for researchers’ contributions to science to be recognised and valued – and also ensure that time spent and burden involved in providing peer review is visible.   If more were done to open up peer review, then perhaps we could start to use it in more innovative ways: for example, if your work is endorsed or given a positive review from a specific expert it could be an extremely valuable complement to another, perhaps, quantitative citation-based metric.

People often complain that publishers are the only people who benefit from the time and insights that referees provide reviewing research, and at F1000 we believe this doesn’t have to be the case. Already by opening up review, our reviewers and authors benefit, but using reviews as an evaluative tool could take this recognition even further.