Bringing Greater Transparency to Peer Review: Wiley and Clarivate Analytics Partner to Launch Innovative Open Peer Review

John Wiley and Sons Inc. (NYSE:JWa) (NYSE:JWb), a global leader in education and scholarly research; Publons, the world’s largest peer review platform; and ScholarOne, the leading manuscript submission system, today announced the launch of the scholarly industry’s first scalable open peer review workflow. Academic journals have faced a number of practical difficulties to adopt such models, hindered by complex and established workflows. Through this partnership, Wiley, ScholarOne, and Publons - both part of Clarivate Analytics - have developed a robust and seamless solution to these challenges.

Beginning with Wiley’s prestigious journal Clinical Genetics, this is the first open peer review initiative to develop a scalable model applicable to diverse publishing processes. The comprehensive workflow provides alignment to best-practice data privacy regulation, ensuring the individual preferences of authors, peer reviewers and journals are met.

The new workflow enables transparent publication of an article’s complete peer review process — from initial review and response through to revision and final publication decision. Alongside the published article, readers can now review a comprehensive peer review history. Each element of the peer review process has also been assigned its own digital object identifier (DOI), enabling future authors to easily reference and cite relevant peer review content.

“We take research integrity immensely seriously at Wiley and see this open peer review initiative as a step towards making the publishing process more transparent,“ said Chris Graf, Director, Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics, Wiley. “This will allow authors, reviewers, editors, and readers to focus on review quality and informed decision-making. It will also dissuade manipulation of the peer review process, and provide reviewers and authors with greater visibility and recognition of their efforts. We are delighted that our partnership with Publons and ScholarOne has brought about a practical and scalable solution, independently validated and securely stored.”

“Among the findings in our recently released Global State of Peer Review report is the greater desire among younger researchers for increased transparency in peer review,” said Andrew Preston, Managing Director, Publons. ”This partnership follows increased demand for open peer review models in recent years, as publishers and researchers strive to bring greater transparency to the research process. Open and transparent peer review will ultimately reduce fraudulent review and any resulting retractions, improving research integrity and reproducibility. Importantly, it also provides greater visibility and recognition of the efforts of reviewers.”

It is expected that this initiative will roll out to other journals, publishers and submission systems in the future, in line with Publons’ publisher-neutral stance.

You can explore some of the first articles published under this initiative here, for example, ‘Genetic variant spectrum in 265 Chinese patients with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis’, and its associated open review content here. You can also read more about the project in a joint blog here.

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About Publons
Publons works with researchers, publishers and research institutions to speed up science and research by harnessing the power of peer review. Publons, founded in 2013 and now part of Clarivate Analytics, has offices in Wellington, New Zealand and London, UK. Publons recently released the Global State of Peer Review report, a comprehensive look at the state of peer review in publishing. The report can be found at https://publons.com/community/gspr. For more information, please visit: publons.com; https://www.facebook.com/publons/    T: @publons 

About Wiley
Wiley is a global leader in education and scholarly research. Our online scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly journals, combined with our digital learning, assessment and certification solutions help universities, learned societies, businesses, governments and individuals increase the academic and professional impact of their work. For more than 210 years, we have delivered consistent performance to our stakeholders. The company’s website can be accessed at www.wiley.com. 

About ScholarOne
ScholarOne provides comprehensive workflow management systems for scholarly journals, books, and conferences. The ScholarOne web-based applications enable publishers and societies to manage the submission, peer review, production, and publication process more efficiently and access intelligent information to help make strategic decisions.

About Clarivate Analytics
Clarivate Analytics is the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to accelerate the pace of innovation. Building on a heritage going back more than a century and a half, we have built some of the most trusted brands across the innovation lifecycle, including Web of Science, Cortellis, Derwent, CompuMark, MarkMonitor and Techstreet. Today, Clarivate Analytics is a new and independent company on a bold entrepreneurial mission to help our clients radically reduce the time from new ideas to life-changing innovations. For more information, please visit clarivate.com.