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The University of London's Birkbeck has been awarded a $99,000 (£76,00) grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation for an academic peer review project which will use the database of science journal PLOS ONE.
Martin Eve, professor of literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, will lead a research team in a project set to analyse peer review at scale. PLOS ONE is the largest scientific journal in the world.
Peer review is the process designed to determine the quality of research submitted for publication and to ensure poor quality or inaccurate works are rejected. Eve's project, "Reading Peer Review", will see the peer review reports on PLOS examined using a range of approaches, on an anonymised and confidential basis. Public Library Of Science (PLOS) executive editor Dr Veronique Kiermer will also be on the seven-strong research team.
Eve commented: "Surprisingly little is known about what peer review looks like at scale. Using a set of cross-disciplinary methodologies, we will study the writing patterns of reviewers and look for trends that can give us insight into how reviewers respond to requests for evaluation.”
Kiermer added: "Working with the Birkbeck group allowed us to find ways to leverage our large dataset of reviews while maintaining confidentiality. This is a great opportunity for PLOS to partner with experts to gain insights and promote evidence-based approaches to peer review.”