Correspondence: Michael Willis, John Wiley & Sons, 9600 Garsington
Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, United Kingdom. Email:
miwillis@wiley.com.
Key
points
- Journals can assess their performance in the peer review process using
a self-assessment tool which encourages them to aspire to continuous
improvement of their processes.
- Journals tend to assess their own performance more positively than is
warranted.
- Journals should focus on ensuring transparency and consistency in the
guidelines and processes they provide to authors, editors and
reviewers.
Introduction
Every innovation starts with a key problem or question to solve. Our
starting point was a question from a Wiley colleague: What does gold
standard peer review look like? This led to other questions: How can a
journal team (comprising academic editors, managing editors and
publishers) really know whether the peer review ‘service’ they deliver
to researchers is as good as that delivered by others? How can they
identify their strengths and address their weaknesses? How can they
differentiate in ways that really matter to researchers?
To answer these questions a team of colleagues began by reviewing
literature on the topic and collecting and analysing 40 case studies in
peer review. The cases were submitted by a range of managing editors,
academic editors and publishers employed by or working with Wiley
spanning different disciplinary areas and geographical regions. The team
identified hallmarks of better peer review and defined five ‘Essential
Areas’ – integrity, ethics, fairness, usefulness and timeliness (Table
1).