It’s Peer Review Week and many are thinking about the course peer review may take in the future. What better time to watch the video of our panel discussion on the future of peer review in ecology from the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting, 2016?

This post was original shared by Alice Plane on the BES website.

Peer review is critical to the research process but has also been the subject of much ongoing criticism and debate. How the process of peer review is changing with new advances in technology, how we ensure quality, fairness and impartiality in peer review, how we reach the next generation of reviewers and how we acknowledge or reward review effort are topics widely discussed by the scientific community. Many peer review models and experiments have emerged across scientific disciplines with the aim of improving the review process, but they often lead to more questions than answers.

The panel debate, organised by the BES Publications team discussed some of these issues and provided an opportunity to seek the views of the BES community on peer review, as well as gathering suggestions for how we could improve or make changes. The audience were engaged participants in the peer review process. Many were currently serving on editorial boards of journals, while others were early career researchers, wanting to find out more about peer review.

The debate was chaired by Jane Hill, Professor of Ecology at the University of York, Chair of BES Publications Committee.

The panel members were:

• Allen Moore, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia, Editor-in-Chief Ecology and Evolution
• Patricia Morse, Managing Editor American Naturalist
• Elizabeth Moylan, Senior Editor at BioMed Central
• Andy Robinson, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Society Services at Wiley
• Nate Sanders, Professor of Macroecology at the University of Copenhagen, Senior EditorJournal of Animal Ecology

The debate covered a diverse range of topics including integrating pre-registration into current publishing practices, making data available to reviewers, making reviews available to readers, thinking about how we can make the best use of the researcher’s time during peer review and harnessing the enthusiasm of early-career researchers to engage in the peer review process.

Want to see more from the event? Read this story from Journal of Animal Ecology.

Look out for more Peer Review Week posts across the British Ecological Society journals throughout the week.