The ECR peer review initiative has two main goals. The first is to shape the current peer review process to be more officially inclusive for early-career researchers, and the second is to campaign for a fairer and more transparent system.
Towards the first goal, we had a fruitful discussion with two members of the eLife Board of Reviewing Editors (George Perry and Kenton Swartz), where we received some input, and inferred that both seemed generally positive about involving ECRs in peer review.
We are currently writing a blog post about what we believe are some of the flaws in the existing system, and what we think should be done to address them. We aim to construct a flow chart/rubric on how to involve ECRs in peer review and encourage reviewing editors to implement them.
We also plan to write a second blog post highlighting why we think it is important for ECRs themselves to be involved in peer review.
To achieve our second aim, we plan to make a comprehensive comparison/curation of existing courses on peer review. We also plan to write up a review on the new version of PreReview, a platform created by Daniela Saderi and others with ASAPBio.
Members involved in this initiative:
Renuka Kudva, Alex van Vliet, Lotte de Winde, Patricia Resa-Infante, Ewoud Compeer, Sarvenaz Sarabipour, Asmaa Elkenawi, Hedyeh Ebrahimi, Shyam Saladi, Steven Burgess, Julia Riley, Tracey Weissgerber