YOUR GO-TO INTELLIGENCE RESOURCE FOR THE SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

JMIR Publications, the leading Canadian open access publisher based in Toronto, has announced a new collaboration with Ryerson University, led by Dr Ebrahim Bagheri, Professor of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering. This collaboration will focus on piloting, testing, and developing an artificial intelligence (AI)–based peer-review system and will bridge the gap between academia and the publishing industry by working together to advance academic publishing.

“JMIR Publications has been an innovator in the open science and scholarly publishing industry for the past 20 plus years, looking at disruptive methods to increase the quality in the publication process and decreasing the time to go through it. The reviewer selection process can significantly impact the time and quality of the scholarly publication process, and we are continuously supporting and experimenting with innovative methods to identify and reward reviewers, further reduce turnaround times, and improve the quality of reviews,” says Gunther Eysenbach, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Editor at JMIR Publications. “We are excited about our collaboration with Dr. Ebrahim Bagheri on his Reviewer.ly initiative that explores how innovative AI methods will be applied to this process for faster and higher quality review and validation of research.”

This collaboration will explore ways to leverage data insights and AI in order to enhance the process of identifying, inviting, and engaging academic reviewers. The objectives of this project are to ensure rigorous peer reviews in a more timely manner; enhance article matching based on reviewer expertise; and automate reviewer assignments for peer-review articles.

Alongside his role as the Program Director for the Computer Engineering program at the Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering at Ryerson, Dr. Bagheri is the Canada Research Chair in Social Information Retrieval and the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Social Media Analytics. He is also a recent recipient of the $1.65 million NSERC CREATE grant on Responsible AI.