As we wrap up Peer Review Week (23-27 September), BSI Journals Manager Sevda Dogan reflects on the importance of peer review in the research community and celebrates the role peer reviewers play at the BSI.
What is peer review and why does it matter?
Peer review is an essential part of scholarly publishing in ensuring the significance, validity, and quality of research. It holds a researcher’s ideas and academic work to the scrutiny of other experts in the same field and creates a filter to ensure that only the best research is published across multiple fields. It relies heavily on the expertise of its reviewers.
Peer review in BSI journals
At the BSI, our journals Clinical and Experimental Immunology (CEI), Discovery Immunology (DSI), and Immunotherapy Advances (ITA) have a single-blind peer-review model. This means that the identity of the reviewers is hidden from the authors. The most significant advantage to this approach is that anonymity allows reviewers to assess an article objectively, free from the pressure of potential criticism.
Who are our reviewers?
All our reviewers are handpicked by our Editors, to ensure the articles are being evaluated fairly and objectively. Over the last two years, we have had many researchers contributing to the immunology research community by getting involved with our journals and reviewing papers in their fields.
Our peer reviewers play an invaluable role in the publication of the BSI journals- we couldn’t do it without them! They share their time and expertise generously and we thank them for this. We’d especially like to thank our most active peer reviewers:
- Professor Esther de Vries (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
- Dr Giuseppe Ramirez (San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Italy)
- Professor Claudio Mauro (University of Birmingham, UK)
- Dr Norma Maugeri (San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Italy)
- Dr Dietmar Zaiss (University of Regensburg, Germany) for their consistent hard work reviewing articles submitted to Clinical and Experimental Immunology.
For their work supporting Immunotherapy Advances journal over the last two years by reviewing manuscripts diligently, we’d like to thank:
- Dr Alsya Affandi (Amsterdam UMC, Netherlands)
- Dr Megat Hamid (CAMS Oxford Institute, UK)
- Dr Matthias Peipp (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany)
- Dr Malcom Sim (University of Oxford, UK)
- Blake Smith (Harvard Medical School, USA)
Furthermore, we’d like to thank our Discovery Immunology reviewers for their continuous support:
- Dr Georgia Perona-Wright (University of Glasgow, UK)
- Dr Audrey Gerard (The Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, UK)
- Dr Nicholas Jones (University of Birmingham, UK),
- Professor Hae Woong Choi (Korea University, South Korea)
- Dr Paul Beavis (Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Australia)
Peer review timings
Thanks to the dedication of our exceptional reviewers, our peer review times for 2024 have been outstanding. For CEI, the average time to first decision is 20 days, with a final decision typically reached within 36 days.
Similarly, for DSI, the average time to first decision is 36 days, with a final decision typically reached within 76 days, and for ITA it is 37 days and 88 days respectively.
Get involved with peer review
A peer-reviewed journal would not survive without the time and support of the reviewers. If you want to get involved with our journals and become a reviewer, please get in touch with our journals team at journals@immunology.org.
References
Kelly J, Sadeghieh T, Adeli K. Peer Review in Scientific Publications: Benefits, Critiques, & A Survival Guide. EJIFCC. 2014 Oct 24;25(3):227-43. PMID: 27683470; PMCID: PMC4975196.
Shoham N, Pitman A. Open versus blind peer review: is anonymity better than transparency? BJPsych Advances. 2021;27(4):247-254. doi:10.1192/bja.2020.61