Current Trends in Peer Review

The SSP webinar program delivers a series of highly informative, thought-provoking webinars designed to challenge and stimulate discussion. Covering timely topics and offered regularly throughout the year, our one-hour webinars are available for viewing 180 days after the live broadcast.

Dr. Holdsworth leads scientific and editorial development at Accdon. He has a particular interest in the successful launch of novel communications formats and unique opportunities for visual scicomm. In his role, Dr. Holdsworth enjoys the satisfying work of partnering with journals, publishers, and researchers to gain traction on these and other difficult issues.

Dana Compton is the Managing Director and Publisher for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), having previously served in the role of Editorial Director for ASCE. Prior to joining ASCE in 2018, she was a Senior Consulting Associate with KWF Consulting, working with society and other clients to develop strategies around scholarly content. Dana has also served as Publication Director for PNAS and held production positions at the American Society of Clinical Oncology and Thompson Publishing Group. Dana is a past President of the Council of Science Editors (2019-2020) and remains an active CSE volunteer. She also serves as a UN/HESI SDG Publishers’ Compact Fellow, is a member of the 2021 Society Street Program Committee, and serves on the Text Recycling Research Project advisory board.

Responsible and rigorous peer review is critical to the academic publishing process. Over the past two years, researchers have not only faced a global pandemic, but have also had to manage an overwhelming flood of requests to review manuscripts. The pandemic has left the already-strained peer review system in a state of burnout. Editors, publishers, and researchers continuously ask themselves: How can we improve, and yet simplify, this essential process? What can we do to support researchers and peer reviewers in sustainable and equitable ways? Join us in this dynamic conversation as speakers discuss how all stakeholders can strike the right balance between streamlining peer review to deal with increasing research output and ensuring that it is thorough enough to uncover critical issues and ethical problems. Strategies for how the academic publishing community can protect and support this essential workflow will also be explored.

Tim Vines is the Founder and Project Lead of DataSeer, a stakeholder toolkit to enable fast, efficient, and scalable promotion of Open Science. Prior to that, he founded Axios Review, an independent peer review company that helped authors find journals that wanted their paper. He was the Managing Editor for the journal Molecular Ecology for eight years, where he led their adoption of data sharing and numerous other initiatives. He writes for the industry-leading Scholarly Kitchen blog and has published research papers on peer review, data sharing, and reproducibility (including one that was covered by Vanity Fair). He has a PhD in evolutionary ecology from the University of Edinburgh and now lives in Vancouver, Canada.