Announcing a New Benefit for PeerJ Peer Reviewers

Here at PeerJ we know that the system of pre-publication peer review in operation in today’s scholarly journal environment would not be possible without the selfless efforts of the peer reviewers themselves. At the vast majority of publishers, peer reviewers gain zero recognition and zero reward for their invaluable work, and so it really isn’t surprising that journals find it hard to persuade reviewers to devote many hours of work to a review with no hope of being credited or rewarded for that work.

Fortunately, we believe that PeerJ provides some powerful solutions to this problem. First of all, we have a solution to the problem of ‘lack of credit’ via our system of Open Peer Review. Specifically, reviewers are given the option of making their name known to the authors, and if they do so (and if the authors choose to publish the review history on the final article), then the work that the reviewer submitted is identified with their name and they gain public credit for having performed the review. Even if the authors chose not to publish their review history then reviewers who provided their name in the process still accrue ‘contribution points’ for their review. We believe that this solution allows reviewers to be appropriately acknowledged for their work and (because most authors choose to publish their review history) in most cases the text that the reviewer contributed is also made public and not ‘lost’ to the world. Examples of reviewers being credited in this way include Kevin Black who peer-reviewed “Whose name is it anyway? Varying patterns of possessive usage in eponymous neurodegenerative diseases” and Ken Takahashi who peer-reviewed “A non-cardiomyocyte autonomous mechanism of cardioprotection involving the SLO1 BK channel”. When these individuals perform more ‘public’ peer reviews then that fact will be reflected on their public profiles (note: reviewers must choose to make their profiles ‘public’ in order to gain this public recognition, otherwise their contributions remain unacknowledged). 

As to the second problem – lack of tangible reward – we are pleased to announce a new ‘reviewer reward’ program for any PeerJ peer reviewer who submits their review on time. Specifically, reviewers who submit an on-time peer review to PeerJ will now be credited with a limited time (12 month) Basic PeerJ Membership. By introducing this benefit, we are acknowledging the hard work that goes into reviewing, by providing those reviewers with a tangible benefit for their work. This benefit means that if a reviewer chooses to submit an article to PeerJ within 12 months of completing their on-time review then they will not need to buy a membership for that publication (although any co-authors would still need to be paying Members, as normal). They can also take full advantage of unlimited submissions to PeerJ PrePrints for as long as their temporary membership is in place.

There is some small print (see below) but we hope and expect that this new benefit will be well received by our reviewers who will understand that we truly appreciate the efforts they make when submitting their reviews in a timely manner.