The Open Research and Contributor ID (ORCID) has announced a partnership with publisher F1000 to develop a practical means to cite peer review activities, based on a standard set of terms and the use of persistent identifiers.
Peer review is an essential component of the research and scholarly lifecycle. Yet, researcher peer review activities are rarely acknowledged as a fundamental contribution to research. At the same time, the need to encourage more researchers to participate in the review process to deal with an ever-increasing number of manuscripts and grants, is bumping into a growing desire to find ways to build more trust into peer review processes.
Working with the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (CASRAI), a community working group has been established to define a standard field set and business rules that would work across the many types of peer review used in publishing, funding, university research management, and conference presentations. Across formal review types, it was found that the main challenge was how to define a standard that is flexible enough to enable the full range of review, from anonymous double-blind processes to fully open review.
Both parties have announced the publication of the Working Group recommendations for a peer review activity data profile. To more clearly articulate the contributions, and to better fit with typical peer review workflows, the Working Group recommended that each review contribution be described independently. For instance, if a person performed four reviews for a particular journal, four review descriptions would be needed to describe the activity. However, to allow for anonymity, which is sometimes needed for peer review activity, aggregation of activities and minimal metadata are acceptable, with only the person, the organization/resource that sponsored the review, the count of reviews over a period of time, and a unique source identifier such as a front matter page listing reviewers, required to recognize the contribution.
Several organisations plan to adopt this peer review citation standard when collecting, storing, and exchanging peer review information. In April 2015, the ORCID technical team started the process of interpreting and implementing the working group recommendations, and will be launching support for peer review in its APIs and user interface this summer.
