Rewarding peer‐review work: the Publons initiative

Peer-review scrutiny of research data is currently the best existing mechanism that ensures scientific integrity of published science. We voiced previously our appreciation for the very important work of reviewers, which is essential for the quality of science released to the public, including articles published in our journal (Carrell such as certificates of excellence, privileges in publishing, enhanced access to the journal's content and bibliographic databases, discounts for books, and other small signs of recognition (reviewed by Gasparyan et al., 2015). Andrology has acknowledged the efforts of reviewers by occasionally publishing the list of all referees in an appendix to the first issue in a given year. We rewarded our busiest reviewers by listing their names in our previous editorial discussing the peer-review (Carrell & Rajpert-De Meyts, 2013). We subsequently mentioned the best referees during all editorial and society meetings but we are aware of a limited value of this reward, as the audiences were usually small. Our most valuable reward and a sign of true recognition has been appointing our best reviewers to the editorial board of Andrology. The reviewers’ task of checking the latest literature has been significantly facilitated as the beginning of the digital era, mainly because of the easy access to world literature via databases such as PubMed, Scopus, or Google Scholar. Even so the editorial task of finding good referees still in large measure relies on using each editor's own pool of favorite reviewers and available colleagues. But the reviewer selection process has recently got a little bit easier – at least for journals using the Scholar One system as their submission system, which is the case for Andrology and our publisher Wiley. The system now links key words of each submitted article directly to relevant publications in Web of Science and suggests names of the most relevant reviewers, including the information of each suggested reviewer's previous record in the journal's database. Each reviewer's evaluation of an article is recorded in archives of each journal, including Andrology. But there were no databases that would allow attributing the reviewers to individuals across publishing houses and organizations. The first important initiative was the creation of ORCID database (orcid.org), which made it possible to identify each researcher and reviewers by an individual ID. Andrology and Wiley support this database, and we strongly encourage everyone – either submitting or reviewing a paper for our journal – to register with ORCID. The logical next step was the appearance of Publons, a website and database created in New Zealand, specifically to record, and potentially reward, peer-review work. The mission statement of Publons is ‘to speed up science and give the experts involved in peer-review the recognition they deserve for their effort’ (prw.publons.com). Publons registers active researchers who perform peer-review, and who are willing to register with them. Each reviewer gains an objective measure of the reviewing effort, and the data are available on Publons’ website for editors, scientific organization, universities etc. A large number of large publishers, including Wiley, have endorsed Publons, and the current number of academic/scholarly journals that collaborate with Publons has surpassed 10,000. Andrology is one of those journals and has implemented direct access to the database. How does it work for the individual reviewer? After you have accepted an invitation to review a manuscript, you will have an option to choose to have your review recorded by Publons. The reviews are not published on the website, so your work remains anonymous. Top reviewers for each year are especially highlighted. This initiative makes reviewing more rewarding, and also more fun, especially for those people who have a competitive nature and like to see themselves climbing up the ranking lists. Some of these top reviewers shared their experience with the readers of Nature, and their opinions were very positive (Van Noorden, 2014). We encourage all our reviewers to register with Publons and benefit from the advantages of this important initiative. We also use this opportunity to wholeheartedly thank all our reviewers, and especially those who have provided a significant number of excellent evaluations, many of which are an inspiring read in itself. The following ‘super referees’ reviewed the greatest numbers of submitted manuscripts within 2015 and three quarters of 2016: Francesco Lotti and Giovanni Corona (26 submissions each), Michael Eisenberg (18), Monica Muratori (16), Sara Marchiani (15), Trevor Cooper (14), Farid Saad (13), Luke Simon (13), Lars Björndahl (12), Ranjith Ramasamy (12) and Kenneth Aston (10). Many thanks! Your work is essential for keeping high scientific quality of papers published in Andrology.