Peer Review Week (11th to 17th September) is a global event celebrating the role that peer review plays in maintaining scientific quality. To mark Peer Review Week we will be running an event at the Francis Crick Institute in London, Europe’s largest single biomedical laboratory under one roof, exploring this year’s theme ‘Transparency in Peer Review’.

Transparency during the peer review of scientific articles raises many questions including what this actually means and how transparency is defined. Does it mean knowing who has peer reviewed an article, being able to read the full peer review reports, or both? Does an increased level of transparency mean improved quality in peer review?

Increasing transparency in peer review makes it possible for reviewers to get recognition for their work. This can be especially important in the case of co-reviewers who are often early career researchers. Transparency in peer review can also act as a training aid, as it allows inexperienced authors and reviewers to see the comments and questions that are raised during the peer review process.

The event will take the form of a panel discussion covering the various levels of transparency and the merits and challenges of each, followed by questions and answers with the audience. We hope that you can join us for at the Francis Crick Institute to help us explore the definition and impact of transparency in peer review during our panel discussion and informally in the reception afterwards.

Hashtag for the event will be #defntransp

Schedule

18:00 - Registration

18:30 – Panel discussion followed by Q&A

19:30 – Wine and refreshments

20:30 – Close

Panel

Chair

Ananyo Bhattacharya, Science Correspondent, The Economist

Panellists

Sabina Alam, Editorial Director, F1000 Platforms

Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research, Wellcome

Meghan Larin, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The Francis Crick Institute

Philippa Matthews, Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellow, University of Oxford

Chair and panelists biographies

Ananyo Bhattacharya is The Economist’s Science correspondent. Before joining The Economist, he spent five years at Nature, first as the journal’s Online News Editor then as Chief Online Editor. He has also worked for Chemistry World and Research Fortnight. He holds a PhD in protein crystallography.

Sabina Alam is the Editorial Director of F1000 Platforms. After completing a PhD in neuroimmunology from the University of Bath, and then a postdoctoral position in neuroscience at the School of Pharmacy in London, Sabina moved from research into scientific publishing in 2008. She was the Chief Editor of the open access journal BMC Medicine from 2011-2016, where she was also involved in various peer review initiatives. Sabina joined F1000 Platforms in 2017.

Robert Kiley is Head of Open Research at the Wellcome where he is responsible for developing and implementing an open research strategy. The overarching aim is to help ensure that researchers are equipped, empowered and motivated to make research outputs findable, accessible and usable – and to use these outputs to accelerate research and improve health. Over the past decade Robert has played a leading role in the implementation of Wellcome’s open access policy and overseeing the development of the Europe PubMed Central repository. Robert also acts as the point of contact for eLife, the open-access research journal, launched in 2012 with the support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust, and more recently championed the work to create a new open publishing platform for Wellcome researchers – Wellcome Open Research. Robert is a qualified librarian and an Associate Member of CILIP. Robert also sits as a Director on the ORCID Board.

Philippa Matthews is a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellow, and a Consultant in Clinical Infection in Oxford. Her research focuses on chronic viral infections, and she is currently running a project focused on improving our understanding of hepatitis B virus infection in southern Africa. She has recently written and illustrated a 'Tropical Medicine Notebook' to make topics in infectious diseases accessible to a wide audience. She is interested in data visualisation and promoting open access science, and has worked with a variety of stakeholders in academic publishing to improve dialogue and collaboration between the research community and a variety of publishers.

Meghan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Francis Crick Institute. Under the guidance of Dr. Stephen West, she is currently researching the regulation of proteins involved in DNA repair processes and the maintenance of genomic stability. Previously, she completed her PhD at the University of Toronto in Pharmacology and Toxicology. Meghan has also developed a strong interest in scientific outreach initiatives and has had involvement in a number of projects, both through the Crick and previously in her native Canada.