What Partnering With Publons Will Mean for Peer Review at Springer Nature

Author: Penny Freedman

The burden on the peer review community is increasing as the volume of published research articles grows. To help address this, Springer Nature and Publons, part of Clarivate Analytics, have announced a partnership to improve the peer review process and enable peer reviewers to receive recognition for their contribution. Find out more from Alison Mitchell, Managing Director, Journals, Springer Nature. 

1. What are the benefits to researchers from this new partnership?

Finding reviewers is one of the slowest parts of the publication workflow and this is reflected in authors’ satisfaction over journals’ time to publish their work – the Publons partnership gives Springer Nature a way to proactively recognise the vital contribution of researchers to the review process, which will help us to build an engaged and rewarded community of researchers around Springer Nature journals.

2. How does it work?

When returning reports for a SN journal, reviewers will be invited to “claim” their verified review on their Publons profile. It’s quick and simple for researchers to claim credit for the peer review they’ve done while enabling their actual contribution to stay anonymous should they wish it to remain so.

3. How will Publons’ Reviewer Recognition Service change Springer Nature’s relationship with reviewers?

Researchers rely on solid peer review input to make sure that their work meets publication standards. An efficient (quality and speed) peer review system is thus imperative to the scientific community. Peer review services such as Publons helps build an engaged and rewarded peer review group, committed to participating in the system . Our new partnership with Publons will foster an environment of positive engagement with the review community, which will translate into an efficient service for our researchers.

4. What are Springer Nature’s plans for rolling out Publons Reviewer Recognition across all journals?

The Publons service will be rolled out to all Springer Nature-owned journals in batches, on Editorial Manager, eJournal Press and any future peer review solutions. We expect it to apply to 1000 journals by the end of 2019.

5. What factors encouraged Springer Nature to pursue a partnership with Publons?

Springer Nature is committed to recognizing and supporting our peer reviewers, who we consider an essential backbone to the scientific publishing industry. We actively pursue multiple approaches to support this community. Publons is a widely used repository by the review community and this partnership will provide those reviewers who wish to deposit their reviews into Publons a tool whereby the reviews will be deposited directly as Springer Nature verified reviews.

6. How will this partnership work with our integration of ORCID?

Our peer-review initiative with ORCID has demonstrated that direct integration between Springer Nature and ORCID is feasible with review data transmittable from our internal systems directly to ORCID where verified Springer Nature data is deposited. Although the Publons partnership will work separately from the ORCID initiative, much can be learned from that model in terms of technicality, functionality, and feasibility.

Read more about our new partnership here.