What is Better Peer Review?

The Better Peer Review Self-Assessment enables you to identify and celebrate where you are doing brilliantly. It offers you advice on how you might consider making improvements when you decide they will be beneficial.

How do we get started?

Just email your Wiley journal manager or betterpeerreview@wiley.com, and we’ll be in touch directly. More information to help you understand what it’s all about is below.

How does it work?

The Better Peer Review Self-Assessment asks you 48 questions and takes most people less than an hour to complete.

You may find it easier to look at the questions first and collect the information you need to complete the self-assessment later – for some of the questions you’ll need insights that particular team members will find easier to provide (for example, depending on how you structure your team, the managing editor, editorial assistant, editor-in-chief, specialty editors, and publisher will likely each have insights that will help). 

You can repeat the Self-Assessment as often as you like. That may be useful for helping you see and celebrate how you’ve improved your processes in line with the guidance given.

Lastly, and importantly: it’s not an exam, it's a self-assessment. No-one is judging your responses. You're in charge! 

How do we know it works?

We built the Better Peer Review Self-Assessment on carefully laid foundations. 

First, we collected 40 case studies from journals like yours, illustrating better peer review in each of our five essential areas: Integrity, ethics, fairness, usefulness, and timeliness. Colleagues shared these with us in September 2017 and wrote them up and pre-printed them in April 2018. 

Second, we built an early version of the Better Peer Review Self-Assessment and tested it with 16 colleagues in three workshops in October and November 2018. We used their feedback to improve it.

Third, we submitted our work for peer review, and published it open access in Learned Publishing in January 2019 in the article “What Does Better Peer Review Look Like?”

And last, in January 2019 we launched our Better Peer Review Self-Assessment for anyone to use.

Since then, we’ve received great feedback. Journal teams publishing in many research disciplines had completed self-assessments for 115 journals by the end of March 2019. They rated the experience with 3.61 stars out of 4 for usefulness. And they shared much positive feedback: 

• “This was a really useful exercise to conduct on my journal. It was apparent that much of what we expect from our authors and reviewers is implicit. We should provide clearer guidance and direction to authors and reviewers to ensure a better, more consistent, and more transparent peer review process for everyone.” Leah Webster, Wiley
• “It was enlightening.” Brian Collins, Wiley
• “It made me think of journal policies from a different point of view.” Sam Moore, Wiley

In late 2019 we pre-printed a further analysis of how 132 journals had been using the Self-Assessment to improve their processes. We found that ‘the Self-Assessment encourages journals to reflect on and change their peer review processes and offers practical guidance on how to do this. They benefit from greater awareness of technical solutions that exist to help them in this.’

You can read more about the whole Better Peer Review project at Wiley in the following resources:

• What does better peer review look like? Underlying principles and recommendations for better practice
• What does better peer review look like? Findings from 132 journals completing a self-assessment exercise

1. Integrity: An Essential Area for Better Peer Review, Part 1/5
2. Ethics: An Essential Area for Better Peer Review, Part 2/5
3. Fairness: An Essential Area for Better Peer Review, Part 3/5
4. Usefulness: An Essential Area for Better Peer Review, Part 4/5
5. Timeliness: An Essential Area for Better Peer Review, Part 5/5