BMJ Product Manager Aradhana Mistry explains how we’ve made it easier to link peer-review activity to a reviewer’s ORCID profile.
Trust and transparency are the pillars of peer review and here at BMJ we are now pleased to be able to further this by ensuring the reviewers across our portfolio of journals are instantly credited on ORCID for their review work. With an ORCID profile ((https://orcid.org/), users can record and link their professional activities together, creating a profile with which to demonstrate the work they do throughout their career. Authors and reviewers can use ORCID to record publication and grant submission progress, build research profiles, track contributions to organisations and claim credit for review work.
After a successful test of this automated accreditation for peer-reviewing on four journals, which showed consistent growth in uptake of the system, we then rolled this automation out to all BMJ journals in January 2021. In order to maintain the integrity of the peer-review accreditation process, we ensured that we were correctly authenticating and collecting appropriate data during the peer review process. We also added a specific question to the review itself to ensure that reviewers directly give permission to be accredited for an individual review.
Lastly, we set up internal processes in our manuscript submission system, ScholarOne, so that when a decision is made on a paper, a series of events is triggered to update the ORCID profile of the reviewers for that paper, whilst also checking against ORCID permission, opt-in status and the ISSN of the journal.
Our data shows there has been a massive increase in uptake by our reviewers. Since the initial rollout, a total of 18,740 ORCID profiles have been successfully updated to credit reviewers with their contribution.
In the future, we could update ORCID profiles with more information, such as the subject of the peer-reviewed manuscript. We could gain more insight into the profile of our reviewers, such as those who frequently review and the journals they review for. We are excited about the potential to extend this work and further improving our recognition of reviewers and the trust and transparency of the peer review process.