By Katherine Brown
As the Executive Editor of Development, published by The Company of Biologists, I’m excited to announce an extension of our relationship with Review Commons. Over the next six months, Development and its sister journal Journal of Cell Science (JCS) will conduct a trial in which editors of our journals will participate in coordinating the peer review of initial submissions to Review Commons. Through this, we hope to support Review Commons’ growth – by expanding the capacity and diversity of the current Review Commons editors available to handle papers and, hopefully, extending the platform’s reach in the developmental and cell biology communities. This trial comes on the back of several successful years of collaboration with Review Commons – which four of the Company’s journals (Development, Journal of Cell Science, Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open) joined as affiliates when the platform launched in 2019.
When I initially heard about the idea for Review Commons – first in conversation with Maria Leptin, EMBO’s then Director, at a conference, and then more formally from Bernd Pulverer, Head of Scientific Publications at EMBO, at a presentation to the Board of The Company of Biologists – I was dubious. Dubious about whether authors would choose to submit to a platform like this, and dubious about how well referees would feel able to assess a paper without knowing the target journal. After all, Review Commons wasn’t the first attempt at journal-independent peer review, and the model had yet to show signs of gaining traction in the life sciences community.
However, I was also excited by the possibility of getting involved in an experiment like this – a coming together of like-minded publishers to try and improve the pathway to publication. After all, I’m very aware that publishing can be a slow, inefficient and, at times, painful business for authors, that referees are overburdened with requests to review papers, and that the scholarly communications system is far from perfect. I also felt that Review Commons – with the backing of an innovative organisation like EMBO (who gave me my start in the publishing world as an Editor at The EMBO Journal) – had, perhaps, a greater chance of success than initiatives that had gone before it.
As a strong supporter of preprints, Development is delighted to be working with Review Commons on this trial. We’re always keen to innovate in the ways we support our community, and we hope that by combining our expertise and resources with those of EMBO Press, we can contribute to the growth and success of Review Commons.
James Briscoe, Editor-in-Chief, Development
I’ve been pleasantly surprised. For The Company of Biologists’ journals at least, Review Commons has worked well. Despite the occasional challenge with workflows, we have – in general – found that the reports from the Review Commons referees have been detailed and constructive and have allowed us to gauge the potential suitability of papers for our journals; we have only rarely needed to seek additional feedback (outside the pool of initial referees) on papers submitted to us. To date, the Company’s journals have handled over 250 papers from Review Commons and have seen 138 through to publication. As you would hope given that Review Commons manuscripts have already been subjected to peer review before submission to the journal, these papers have a greater chance of acceptance than papers submitted through the standard route, and the time from submission to publication is much shorter. Anecdotally, we also know that authors who have published with us through the Review Commons route have been happy with the process.
Review Commons’ author-centric mission aligns with that of The Company of Biologists. So when Thomas Lemberger, Deputy Head of EMBO Scientific Publications and Project Lead for Review Commons, approached both me and James Briscoe, Development’s Editor-in-Chief, about the idea of having editors from outside EMBO Press contribute to handling some of the initial submissions to Review Commons, we were both keen to find a way to test this out. Our colleagues at JCS, who publish a significant number of Review Commons papers, were also enthusiastic about taking part. Following several months of preparation, we’re now in a position to launch this trial, whereby a subset of editors from Development and JCS will coordinate the peer review of some Review Commons submissions in the relevant fields. A proportion of papers in the cell and developmental biology fields that pass initial triage by Review Commons’ editors will be passed over to The Company of Biologists and distributed to our Academic Editors, who will then identify and recruit referees. Manuscripts will be assigned based on the topic of the submission and expertise of the participating Academic Editors. As is currently the case, authors will remain unaware of the identity of the editor handling their paper to avoid biasing the authors in their choice of downstream journal, and no journal recommendation will be made at the point where reports are returned to the authors.
We are very excited and grateful that The Company of Biologists is starting this pilot. It is an important step for Review Commons that will set the stage for a preprint peer review system that benefits from economies of scale and a diversified set of expertise.
Thomas Lemberger, Review Commons Project Lead
What do we want to achieve with this trial? Firstly, as Review Commons grows, distributing the workload among editors of the affiliate journals provides a mechanism to scale up the coordination of the peer review process without compromising its quality. Secondly, by engaging editors with expertise complementary to that of the EMBO Press editors, we hope it may be easier to identify and recruit appropriate referees. Thirdly, we aim to raise the profile of Review Commons in our respective fields. For Review Commons to thrive, it needs the support of its affiliate journals, and we believe that this trial with Development and Journal of Cell Science may act as a template for other affiliates in future. Finally, and most importantly, we want to offer authors the best possible experience at Review Commons by ensuring that their papers are seen by the most appropriate experts in a timely manner. By supporting Review Commons, we are also supporting our communities as they consider the wider variety of routes to publication now available to them. We look forward to sharing the results of this trial in due course.
Thanks for sharing this.