Innovation in peer review: An interview with Dr. Gareth Dyke

"I’d like to see these tools shaping the future by making peer review faster and easier for researchers while at the same time ensuring integrity." - Dr. Gareth Dyke

As a part of our expert panel for Peer Review Week 2024, we interviewed Dr. Gareth Dyke on Editage Insights.

Gareth is a prolific scientific author who has published more than 300 articles in peer-reviewed journals over the last 20 years, including in Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy (USA) and other high-profile outlets. His research has been widely covered in the media and he is often invited to present talks and lead workshops around the world, most recently in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, China, Colombia, Spain, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Workshops in China run by Gareth in 2019 were attended by more than 5,000 colleagues. He has written numerous news and other popular articles including in Scientific American, New Scientist, and Nature and is a regular contributor to The Conversation (scientific news website).

He also manages the Taylor & Francis journal Historical Biology as Editor-in-Chief. Gareth has mentored students at all levels (Masters, PhD, Adult Education) and has developed a large range of in-class teaching techniques. He has worked in the USA, Ireland, and the UK, including for more than 20 years as a full-time University academic (University College Dublin, National Oceanography Centre University of Southampton). Gareth is Director of Academic Relationships and Business Development at Bentham Science Publishers.

Gareth is uniquely positioned to teach and advise with authority on all aspects of the scientific publishing process, grant writing, and personal development as he is an experienced researcher, reviewer, editor, and journal manager with a strong background in technical and popular writing. He is accredited as a course leader and teacher by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) in the UK as well as by the Irish HEA.

Here is what he had to say about innovation and peer review:

In your opinion, what are the most promising technological advancements in peer review, and how do you see them shaping the future?

At the moment, peer review is a basic process (dependant on the expertise of the poor reviewers, invited by editors) and not much technology is involved … so there is lots of scope for improvement, both from the perspectives of journals and editors and from the perspective of researchers who are asked to review.

I would say though that no matter how much technology we add - this process is about the expertise of other researchers. I’d like to see technology being used to make everyone’s lives easier, rather than attempting to replace peer reviewers themselves.

So, tools such as those to check articles before they go to peer reviewers are useful - editing, plagiarism, figure consistency and manipulation, even statistical checks - on the editorial side are now being widely implemented and are super useful …. for reviewers, especially for those who do not speak English as their first language, tech can be used to help: to summarise papers in other languages, even to allow a peer review in another language which is then presented to the author in English, for example.

I’d like to see these tools shaping the future by making peer review faster and easier for researchers while at the same time ensuring integrity - making it much harder for ‘bad actors’ to game the system … ensuring the final quality of published research.

With the rise of AI-driven tools in peer review, how can we ensure that the integrity of the review process is maintained?

This is going to be hard. We don’t want to end up in a place where peer reviewers are just using AI for their reviews - there is a risk here of both laziness and integrity issues. I think that this needs to be addressed with peer reviewer training and the use of integrity advisors at publishers and Author Services companies. Peer reviews, until recently, have not been really carefully checked by publishers, and this needs to change.

What measures should be taken to balance human judgment with technological assistance in peer review?

Handling editors at journals have to take the lead here and ensure that review is really been overseen by ‘people’.

What are the main challenges or barriers to the adoption of new technologies in peer review?

Researchers, I think, are happy to see their own papers edited, or even written in part by AI, but do not seem content to see their work peer reviewed by AI.

Looking ahead, what trends in technology do you think will have the most significant impact on peer review over the next decade?

For sure AI, tools - for writing and editing and translating but also for selecting and finding effective peer reviewers …

How can we prepare for the potential challenges and opportunities that these future trends might bring?

Training is needed and publishers are far behind the global curve in this area, I’d argue.

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