Peer Review Week roundup with Helen Hardy

Helen Beynon (née Hardy) is lead research integrity adviser in Cambridge's Publishing Ethics and Research Integrity Team. She is responsible for supporting our publishing programme in publication ethics best practice. We met with Helen to find out what her takeaways were from this year's Peer Review Week.

What’s one of your key takeaways from this week?  

Aries Systems ’ Practical Ethical Publishing To Support Research Integrity session highlighted how publishing tech providers solicit and act upon user feedback, including that of peer reviewers. This has prompted me to learn more about Cambridge’s relationships with these services internally, for example, how our Online Peer Review Systems (OPRS) support team manage author and reviewer feedback, and whether there are related research integrity issues we should collaborate on, to ensure consistent messaging.

Is there anything you will do differently after peer review week? 

Jeff Christie from Aries Systems provided key tips on how to get editors onboard with journal ethics policies, including capturing key ethical data at submission. Cambridge launched a competing interest project in 2020, which has led to the majority of journals we publish adopting a workflow for capturing and reviewing peer reviewer competing interests within the OPRS. Our lessons learned from this project can be combined with the advice from this session to inform how we engage with external editors on issues of research integrity going forward.

What do you see as the biggest challenge facing research integrity and peer review?

The academic publishing industry frequently sees peer reviewers come to the role without sufficient support or understanding of the obligations. Similarly, many peer reviewer lack adequate time to develop their peer reviewing skills due to their other academic commitments. 

Closer collaboration between publishers and institutions is required to combat these challenges. Cambridge leads peer reviewer workshops at higher education institutions, which cover how to engage with the peer review process as the author of a manuscript under review. Our Guide to Peer Reviewing Journal Articles gives a practical introduction to conducting effective peer reviews, especially for those who are new to the process.  

If you could make one change to peer review to improve the integrity of academic publishing, what would it be? 

At the Ease / UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) panel discussion on peer review this week, Gowri Gopalakrishna spoke about the need for peer review to occur at all stages of the research lifecycle, not just at the end. When managing ethics cases at Cambridge, we often see peer review referred to as a ‘catch-all’ that ensures the academic community can have absolute confidence in the research presented in a published article.  

In an ideal world, the academic publishing industry would expand its definition of ‘peer review’ to include formally and informally sought feedback from academic colleagues, and comments posted on preprints. Likewise, journals, publishers and industry groups would clearly establish the remit of peer review as we know it now, and conduct separate research integrity checks and processes. 

What do you most enjoy about working in research integrity? 

The real-life impact of improved research integrity on scientific progress and reliability. Particularly satisfying is when we make demonstrably more progress towards a future with better research integrity via cross-publisher collaboration – no publisher is an island!

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