Biology Open smashes the peer review mold

(Press-News.org) Academic peer review is notoriously cumbersome. The process assesses the quality of scientific research prior to publication in an academic journal, sometimes delaying publication by many months. The system depends on members of the academic community providing their time and expertise for free. However, finding reviewers can be lengthy and there are no consequences when reviewers produce poor-quality reports lacking constructive feedback. Daniel Gorelick, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biology Open believed that there could an alternative. ‘My vision is a peer review system that is both fast and high quality’, says Gorelick. He realised that the system required an overhaul and to be successful it would require a strong incentive for reviewers to return high-quality peer review reports fast; ‘and the most effective incentive? Money!’, he says. Based on this vision, Gorelick has dismantled the conventional peer review system, coming up with a new structure. In a publishing first, Gorelick and Biology Open Managing Editor, Alejandra Clark, have run a 6-month proof-of-concept trial recruiting a team of contracted reviewers that were paid £220 ($280) per manuscript to return high-quality peer review reports within 7 business days, smashing peer review delays and providing an outstanding service to the scientists that publish in the journal.

‘For the pilot we chose subject areas handled by only two of our ten editors’, says Clark, who focused the trial on animal physiology and developmental biology to test the new peer review system. The challenge was to ensure that peer reviewers would submit constructive reports on time. Initially Gorelick and Clark recruited 12 reviewers that were paid a 3-month £600 retainer, regardless of whether they peer reviewed any papers. But this strategy proved too costly for expansion. Gorelick and Clark designed an alternative approach, where reviewers were paid per manuscript.

But how could Gorelick and Clark ensure that reviewers accepted the invitation to review swiftly? They devised a contract, stipulating that each reviewer must accept or decline an invitation to review within one business day, or risk losing future opportunities to review for the journal. Clark was then faced with expanding the pool of contracted reviewers. ‘We recruited them through targeted outreach, including invitations to previous Biology Open reviewers, invitations to writers that contribute to one of The Company of Biologists community websites and contacts within relevant research fields’, she explains.

In July 2024, Gorelick and Clark pressed the start button for their peer review revolution, with all of the contracted reviewers’ returning their reports within the stipulated 7 business days, often faster. And the journal Editors were impressed by the rigor of the reports, with several of the earliest submitted research papers failing to meet the standard required for publication. The experiment was working, the peer review service provided by the contracted reviewers was high quality and efficient. But Gorelick and Clark knew that they also needed to monitor the quality of the reviewers’ reports, to ensure that it was not compromised by the fast turnaround. They asked Lewis Halsey, University of Roehampton, UK, and Tristan Rodriguez, Imperial College London, UK, the Editors overseeing the peer review process, to rate the constructiveness of each reviewer’s report to ensure that they all met the high standards demanded of the journal. In total the Biology Open team has navigated 20 papers through the Fast & Fair peer review pilot and Gorelick is delighted that his vision has been vindicated. ‘I was amazed that it worked!’, he exclaims.

How has this extraordinary proof of concept been received by the scientific community? ‘Thank you so much for the speedy handling of our manscript at Biology Open. It has been a very positive experience and we are really excited to see our work published with you’, says Cerys Manning, University of Manchester, UK. And in an anonymous response to a survey, a member of the reviewing team said, ‘This Fast & Fair peer review experiment demonstrates that Biology Open is not only committed to but also at the forefront of wanting to make a real change to the arguably old-fashioned peer-review system, by rewarding the time and effort spent by scientists to quality-assure the work of peers’.

Biology Open is now expanding their preliminary trial to include all manuscripts submitted for peer review to the journal. ‘We are continuously recruiting new reviewers to cover more subject areas’, says Clark as she and Gorelick begin looking for like-minded researchers, committed to the publishing ethos of Biology Open, to sign up to this publishing revolution.

The announcement of the Biology Open Fast & Fair initiative is being made by Dan Gorelick at the Biologists 100 meeting in Liverpool, UK, on 25 March, 2025, celebrating the 100-year anniversary of The Company of Biologists.

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Additional information

Alejandra Clark alejandra.clark@biologists.com (first contact) and Dan Gorelick bio.edinchief@biologists.com (second contact) can be contacted for interviews and comments.

Biology Open is an open access journal, published by The Company of Biologists, which publishes rigorous, high-quality research across the breadth of the biological and biomedical sciences. The journal provides timely, thorough, constructive and fair peer review, with a focus on supporting researchers and reducing the pain to publish. The Company of Biologists is a not-for-profit publishing organisation dedicated to supporting and inspiring the biological community. The Company is run by distinguished practising scientists and exists to profit science, not shareholders. The aim is to inspire new thinking and support the community of biologists, through publishing leading peer-reviewed journals, facilitating scientific meetings and communities, providing travel grants for young researchers and supporting research societies.

This announcement is accompanied by an Editorial published in Biology Open at https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article-lookup/doi/10.1242/bio.061982 and the preprint describing the trial in more detail is at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.18.644032v1.

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