The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publisher of the Science family of journals, has announced the acquisition of 'Peer Review Evaluation' (PRE), a web-based service that promotes public trust in science by making the review of original research more transparent and verifiable.
Offering benefits to readers, publishers, and authors, PRE can be customised to display details about how research articles have been assessed. The technology, launched in 2014 by the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Inc. (JBJS), and acquired by AAAS on June 30, 2015, is consistent with the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. These principles, established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), urge participating journals to clearly indicate whether or not articles have been peer-reviewed, and to publicly disclose peer-review procedures.
PRE is already available to users of the JBJS family of journals as well as those published by the American Diabetes Association. PRE will be implemented and made available on the Science journals—Science, Science Translational Medicine, Science Signaling and Science Advances—later this year.
PRE will continue to support existing integrations with the HighWire Press publishing platform and with the Aries Systems' Editorial Manager manuscript system. Integrations with other scholarly publishing platforms and manuscript submission systems are already in development.
When integrated with a publisher's manuscript submission system, PRE can be set up to display increasing levels of insight about paper handling—from submission and acceptance dates, to the number of peer-reviewers and their role in the assessment, or even reviewers' comments, if desired.
Moving forward, AAAS plans to further develop the PRE technology so that it can verify whether or not an author has deposited supporting data to an appropriate repository. According to Science Publisher Kent Anderson, AAAS is also exploring leveraging PRE to support open science practices and the feasibility of certification and training services for peer reviewers and publishers as part of PRE's development roadmap.
Anderson commended the pioneering work of PRE Founder Adam Etkin. "We are indebted to Adam Etkin for his innovation and leadership in developing PRE to help promote ethical, rigorous peer review," Anderson said. "His vision and creativity have consistently advanced the highest standards in scholarly publishing, and although he will now step away from his role as PRE managing director, I look forward to watching his continued progress."
