Peer Review Evaluation (PRE) and HighWire Press partner to increase transparency for peer review

HighWire Press announces a partnership with Peer Review Evaluation (PRE) to offer turn-key integration of PRE, a transparency service from AAAS that improves the visibility of the peer review process. To mark this partnership and help publishers illustrate the integrity of their peer review process, PRE will cover any development costs for the first five HighWire publishing partners to adopt PRE in 2017.  The PRE service uses an API to display details about the peer review process applied to an article when it goes live, without changing editorial workflows or requiring editorial action by using manuscript meta-data.

“Together, PRE and HighWire will help partners increase awareness of the significant investment in peer review made by editors, reviewers, authors and publishers,” commented Will Schweitzer, Director, Product and Custom Publishing at AAAS. “New readers and prospective authors may not be aware of a journal’s reputation for quality peer review, especially for newly-launched, open access, and multi-disciplinary journals. The PRE badge provides easy access to journal policies and article peer review information to increase awareness and trust in the journal’s peer review process to enhance the journal’s reputation.”

In market research conducted by PRE, 95 percent of readers of scholarly research said they want a clear indicator that the article they are reading is peer reviewed and 74 percent want to see details about the peer review method used. The number of visitors viewing the PRE display is another indicator of reader interest in peer review.  Each month, there are as many as 13,000 reader clicks on the PRE badge across prestigious journals in the Science family.

CEO of HighWire Press, Dan Filby added “At HighWire, we believe sharing data and analytics at every stage of the publishing lifecycle delivers value for readers, authors, and publishers. PRE provides readers with evidence of the integrity of publishers’ peer review process using meta-data from BenchPress or any editorial manuscript system. We are excited to launch PRE with more publishers as they take advantage of the offer marking this new partnership.”