Is the Publons system of recognition the way forward for peer review?

Although peer review is heralded as one of the most effective ways of filtering the science that reaches publication, it has ironically remained a largely unacknowledged task. Reviewers have often questioned whether peer review is a thankless job or a duty to the academic community for the lack of adequate recognition or compensation for their contribution. To address this and related issues, two former academicians—Andrew Preston and Daniel Johnston—founded an open access peer review platform, Publons. Publons, which was launched in the year 2013, currently has over 28, 931 reviewers.

One of the major goals behind founding Publons is providing researchers with incentives to review papers, which in turn would hasten the review process. Through the platform, researchers will gain recognition for their work and expertise, encouraging them to review more papers and thus speed up the reviewing process.

The Publons site offers merit points to reviewers based on the volume of reviews they upload plus the number of reviews that get endorsed by others. Some experts might question whether this would lead to problems such as self-endorsements, which can skew the merit system. However, if practiced effectively, the merit points can not only add value to the reviewers’ curriculum vitae but also provide journals a pool of quality reviewers. Interestingly, Publons is the first platform to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to peer reviews; the best articles are allotted a DOI, which can help authors advance their career and showcase their expertise.

Additionally, Publons aims to provide reviewers an open access platform where they can record all the reviews they have worked on, making the review process more transparent than ever before. An additional feature the site offers is that reviewers, journals, and authors can decide how each review is displayed on their profile. One question that thus arises, with no clear answer at hand, is how comfortable would authors be with making their papers’ reviews publicly accessible.

Altogether, Publons appears to be a promising forum that can change the way the peer review system has been operating. Peer reviewers will be able to assert their role in academic publishing and this can set new trends and bring about a major change in the traditional peer review process. Nevertheless, since peer review remains a responsibility researchers take on over and above their own research and other academic engagements, it remains to be seen whether recognition of this sort would motivate reviewers sufficiently to allot more time and attention to their reviews.                   

To know more about Publons and its co-founder Andrew Preston, read this interview: A mission to speed up science - Publons.