Celebrating Peer Review Week 2021 at Springer Nature

To celebrate the theme of this year’s Peer Review Week, “Exploring the multifaceted role of identity in peer review,” we are pleased to share a collection of pieces curated by our Nature Portfolio editors that highlight the intersection between identity and the many different aspects of research and scholarly publishing.

Peer Review Week is a virtual community-led yearly global event celebrating the essential role that peer review plays in maintaining scientific quality. The event brings together individuals, institutions, and organizations committed to sharing the central message that good peer review, whatever shape or form it might take, is critical to scholarly communications.

This post is part of our wider outreach for this year’s Peer Review Week, which reaffirms Springer Nature’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in our publishing activities.

Diversity and scientific careers (Nature): These resources highlight science’s ongoing diversity problem and the many creative and courageous initiatives led by working scientists to deliver a more inclusive workplace, resulting in better research outcomes.

Distributed peer review enhanced with natural language processing and machine learning (Nature Astronomy): We present the result of an experiment running a machine-learning-enhanced distributed peer-review process for allocation of telescope time at the European Southern Observatory. In this work, we show that the distributed peer review is statistically the same as a ‘traditional’ panel, that our machine-learning algorithm can predict expertise of reviewers with a high success rate, and that seniority and reviewer expertise have an influence on review quality.

Let’s talk about race: changing the conversations around race in academia (Communications Biology): Jasmine Miller-Kleinhenz et al. highlight the risk of science and academia’s general neutrality to discussions around race and social justice. Their collectively-developed course represents a framework to begin these important discussions and improve conversations on race in academia.

Guidelines for healthy global scientific collaborations (Nature Ecology & Evolution): Global scientific partnerships should generate and share knowledge equitably, but too often exploit research partners in lower-income countries, while disproportionately benefitting those in higher-income countries.

Genes do not operate in a vacuum, and neither should our research (Nature Genetics): It’s time for a paradigm shift in the scientific enterprise. Our social responsibilities, especially as stakeholders in a field such as genetics, are central to the responsible conduct of research.

Redesign open science for Asia, Africa and Latin America (Nature): Researchers in many countries need custom-built systems to do robust and transparent science.

Mentorship as a mechanism to mobilize inclusion (Nature Immunology): Different kinds of mentorship provide avenues for researchers to support the development of a more diverse and inclusive science workforce.

Make equity essential to expedite change in academia (Nature Microbiology): In response to COVID-19, universities and other education providers pivoted rapidly from in-class learning to digital course instruction. Student tuition was deemed essential, thus swift change ensued. Similarly, if equity, diversity and inclusion are truly deemed essential at those same institutions, change could occur now — not later.

Sovereignty at the heart of aging well for Australia’s First Nations (Nature Aging): Indigenous Australians, one of the oldest living civilizations in the world, are growing older despite centuries of health and social inequity. Further improvements in longevity and aging will require a life-course approach and community-led initiatives.

Genetic discrimination: introducing the Asian perspective to the debate (npj Genomic Medicine): This aims to provide a comprehensive portrayal of how seven Asian jurisdictions have sought to address the challenge of genetic discrimination by presenting an analysis of the relevant legislation, policies, and practices.

Transforming global health through equity-driven funding (Nature Medicine): Black people living in Africa must be involved in setting the priorities for global health research, policies and programs that affect their daily lives, in order to move away from a funding culture that fosters colonialism, racism and white supremacy.

Springboard to science: the institutions that shaped Black researchers’ careers (Nature): Historically Black colleges and universities offer personal and professional support that predominantly white US institutions do not.