Page 44 - Straive eBook: Redefining Your Peer Review Experience

44 Straive | Redefining Your Peer Review Experience

The peer review process is indisputably the soul of scientific publishing as it ensures the
scientific validity of scholarly publications. It begins with finding a suitable reviewer for the
manuscript. It is essential to find reviewers with the right expertise to evaluate a submitted
manuscript.

Finding the right reviewers is one of the most challenging tasks, and having a dedicated team
of experts to identify ideal reviewers can be a key enabler in the process.

A leading journal publisher, offering both open access and subscription-based publications,
was looking at ways to reduce peer review time and found that reviewer search was a
bottleneck and sought a partner to support this task. The publisher selected Straive’s
Reviewer Selection Services to support their peer review administration process off-site.

The Challenge - Reducing TAT to
• Setting up a team of Improve the Review Cycle
Masters/PhDs in the domain
of the journals in scope Improving TAT from submission to publication is
• Growing the team from 10 to considered an area for continuous improvement in
45+ FTEs the journal publication cycle. The review speed of
• Expanding domain from the journal within peer review can be inferred from
Biomedical to Physical two metrics - the time to first decision and time to
Sciences and Engineering, final decision. The time to the first decision on
and Life, Earth and manuscripts is the time from submission to the
Environmental Sciences communication of the first decision to the author,
• Supporting 120 journals and may generally take 2 – 10 weeks.

Quality in reviewer selection significantly reduces the
time-to-first-decision of the submitted manuscript –
a key factor in author satisfaction. Straive’s reviewer
selection service involves post-graduate associates
with the domain expertise to select appropriate
reviewers by evaluating current manuscript and
publication histories of potential reviewers in related
areas following specific reviewer selection criteria,
including conflict of interest checks.