Peer Review Week roundup with Jennifer Wright

Dr Jennifer Wright leads Cambridge's Publishing Ethics and Research Integrity Team, responsible for supporting our publishing programme in publication ethics best practice. We met with Jen to find out what her takeaways were from this year's Peer Review Week.

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

I listened to the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) Webinar on Tuesday and what stayed in my mind was the idea that we really need to think about how responsibility and resourcing for what we currently call “peer review” can be better managed and distributed across the scholarly ecosystem, to help uphold research integrity and public trust in research. There’s much to do, and we all (institutions, researchers, publishers, funders, etc.) have a role to play together. For example, there are real opportunities to look at what type of peer review occurs at what stage of research, and how all this can be best deployed to increase transparency, integrity and reproducibility. [This recording is not yet available but will be hosted here.]

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

Worry some more about papermills! Jokes aside, I’m part of the Cambridge Peer Review Advisory Board and we usually have a “Peer Review Week debrief”. What I'll do this year is really emphasise to this group that peer review is (and should be!) changing. There are so many great ideas and opportunities to improve things for everyone and we can’t expect or assume that how we do things now will continue to work.

We are exploring many approaches at Cambridge – from new publishing concepts like Research Directions to community areas on our open research platform, Cambridge Open Engage, but I think what peer review means and does is a thread that runs through all of this.

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

Honestly, I think one of the biggest challenges is acknowledging that peer review isn’t one thing! Peer review is and does many things, and we’re not as mindful or transparent enough about that as we could be.

For example, sometimes peer review is talked about as though it’s a one-off opportunity to “safety test” research before it hits the road. More than that, once it’s safety tested through this one-off process, it’s assumed to be infallibly “right” in some way. This “safety testing” is where research integrity comes in – the assumption is that peer review is set up to “catch” research misconduct, irreproducible research, fraud, fabrication, manipulation and so on. In reality, peer review alone is not set up to do this.

Additionally, the peer review process can sometimes be the SOURCE of misconduct (such as citation manipulation, papermills, plagiarism, suppression or gatekeeping of valid results) Therefore, if we were going to design a true “safety test” for research, I don’t think peer review as we know it would be it!

The other common description of peer review is as a primarily intellectual community endeavour – part of the research process - like sharing work at a conference, getting feedback, raising awareness and profile, etc. Peer review does do this, and we often get feedback from both peer reviewers and authors about how helpful the process has been in this regard. 

I think it would be more helpful to think about trust in research more broadly rather than using the term “peer review” as shorthand for all of this. There’s probably a lot academia can learn from other industries about how trust and “quality assurance” could be done.  

Did Peer Review Week change my mind on this? Not really! But it was great to have a chance to reflect on the different angles and perspectives brought together during the week.

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

For me this would breaking up “peer review” and joining it back up into a new “jigsaw” of integrity signals (with what we now think of as peer review as part of it) to provide users of research content with what they need to do their work. Different users need different things, and content doesn’t need to be at the same level of “vetting” or consensus for all users of that content. For example, it might be fine for an expert dermatology researcher to read a preprint and assess for themselves exactly what they have confidence in and what they don’t, then decide what to use from the preprint accordingly. It’s not realistic to expect a GP or patient to do the same. 

What do you most enjoy about working in research integrity?

I like the mixture of real-world impact and intellectually motivating problem-solving.  As an ex-academic I've seen some of the best and worst of research culture. I love working in research integrity, as it’s opportunity to build on the positives and improve the worst! I also get to collaborate with people across many different disciplines, backgrounds, and perspectives across the academic ecosystem. My job means I get stuck into everything from the philosophical underpinnings of publication ethics to the use of persistent identifiers and AI tools to support integrity. There’s never a dull day in research integrity and publication ethics!

Visit our blog for more Peer Review Week posts