In response to requests from the community for flexible registering of peer review content (and associated discussions of published content), Crossref has extended its infrastructure to not only support the registration of this content, but also the easy retrieval, use and reuse of it, through its public API. The initiative is seen to be a major advancement for the discoverability and usability of peer review reports.
Late last year, after collaboration with like-minded member organisations, Crossref opened a new deposit schema to enable the registration of peer reviews, referee reports, decision letters, author responses, and community comments. Metadata to characterise both the peer review type and stage-to accurately reflect the history of the review-can now be deposited and searched for.
Metadata for over 10,000 peer reviews is now openly available and easily retrievable for analysis and integration into other tools and services, through Crossref's public API.
Organisations such as BMJ, ASAPBio, PeerJ, and ScienceOpen have been driving the development of peer review content registration. They recognise the importance of persistent records for peer review content; and understand this supporting metadata enriches scholarly discussion, reviewer accountability, transparency, and peer review analysis.
As the data is not subject to copyright and no sign-up is required to use it, anyone can retrieve the information necessary for their own integration and analysis. Institutions and researchers will now be able to build a stronger picture around the role of the peer review in scholarly communications as a whole, in addition to identifying and assessing their own contributions.
Quick to respond to the shifting needs around scholarly communications, Crossref is committed to the expansion of their infrastructure to support the demands of scholarly progression and scientific discovery. The availability of peer review data is just one of the many progressions the non-profit organisation has made in recent months to aid facilitation of transparency and governance, and to put research in context.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
