Improving peer review and recognizing experts
UPDATE December 12, 2018
Press Release: Springer Nature and Publons enter wide-ranging partnership to bring greater efficiency and recognition to peer review
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Peer review matters. Expert peer review helps improve the work of others and protects the world from harmful science that can set back advances in human understanding by decades. That’s why Springer Nature supports Publons, a network of over 70,000 experts showing their commitment to speeding up science through superior peer review.
Publons is a free service for academics that lets you effortlessly track, verify and showcase your peer review activity across the world’s journals. With Publons, you can:
- Show the world you're committed to speeding up science as an expert peer reviewer.
- Include proof of your peer review activity in that next big promotion or research grant application.
- Help journal editors find your expert peer review talents quicker, so the best research gets published faster.
Springer Nature is excited to run a pilot project with Publons (from September 2016). The following journals have been integrated. More might follow over the next couple of months.
Participating journals
Archives of Virology
BioData Mining
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Genetics in Medicine
Genome Biology
Gigascience
Hydrobiologia
Journal of Global Optimization
Journal of Material Science
Journal of Real-Time Image Processing
Maternal and Child Health Journal
Molecular Brain
Oecologia
Optimization Letters
Plant and Soil
The European Physical Journal Plus
Read our blog about Peer Review Week 2016
We are using Publons
Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, Indiana University
Through Publons, I thank the many anonymous reviewers who have provided me assistance in evaluating manuscripts as an editor.
Senior Lecturer, School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington
Academic promotion criteria requires that I talk about what I’m doing to serve the community. Now I can point people to my [Publons] profile and there are the statistics. You can see my review acceptance rate, how many I do, for which journals and it can even inform people who might want to use me as a reviewer. It was an absolute no brainer to include my Publons profile and verified review record in my promotion application.
Professor, Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki
- Why is it great to see Springer Nature partnering with Publons to recognise the efforts and importance of peer reviewers?
I think it is great to see Springer Nature partnering with Publons. It makes logging of reviews even more easy.
- How does it make you feel to know that others can see how much you contribute to the research published by Springer Nature?
I like the idea of one’s review activity being transparent. As a person who has loaded the review system quite a bit, I feel obliged do my share of reviewing. Publons helps me to stay on track in this respect.
Clinical Professor, Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, New York Medical College
Publons helps you to record, verify and showcase your peer review contributions. I just signed up – how about you.