Every September, we celebrate Peer Review Week, an event that ‘unites individuals, institutions, and organizations dedicated to promoting the core message that effective peer review, in all its forms, is essential to the advancement of scholarly communication’ , As we approach the end of this week, we reflect on our peer reviewers that support us in our goals to uphold high standards in our published immunology research.
Our Publisher, Oxford University Press, describes peer review as ‘the assessment of research by appropriately qualified peers and stakeholders. The objective is both to validate the work and facilitate its improvement, and the process takes into account current knowledge in the field.’ We know that good peer review is essential to the success of our journals and ensuring that we only publish quality research.
In 2023 alone, 10,000 research papers were retracted across publishers. With the development of AI, we believe this number has the potential to increase as ‘proliferation of AI has introduced sophisticated means of data fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism, posing fresh dilemmas in the maintenance of ethical standards’. Against this backdrop of growing ethical misconduct, including the rise of AI-generated text, images, and even fabricated data that can make inauthentic content increasingly difficult to detect therefore, attention to detail and rigorous, thorough peer review is imperative to uphold the quality of the scholarly record. We know that our reviewers’ time is in demand, and so we want to extend our thanks to them for their commitment to reviewing our papers. We would like to thank our most active peer reviewers across our three journals:
Clinical and Experimental Immunology
Hon Prof. David Fulcher (Australian National University, Australia)
Dr Giuseppe A Ramirez (IRCCS Ospedale San Raffaele, Italy)
Dr Dietmar Zaiss (Regensburg University, Germany)
A/Prof. Mingwei Lin (University of Sydney, Australia)
A/Prof. Janet Markle (Vanderbilt University, USA)
Immunotherapy Advances
Dr Alsya Affandi (Amsterdam UMC, Netherlands)
Dr Kirsten Ward-Hartstonge (University of Otago, New Zealand)
Dr Majid Ghareghani (University of Toronto, Canada)
Prof. Roslyn Kemp (University of Otago, New Zealand)
A.Prof. Katelyn Byrne (Oregon Health and Science University, USA)
Discovery Immunology
Dr Vuk Cerovic (Aachen University, Germany)
Dr Markus Geuking (University of Calgary, Canada)
Dr Julie Worrell (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Dr Camille Blériot (Gustave Roussy, France)
Dr Katie Chapple (University of Glasgow, UK)
Not only do our peer reviewers provide quality reviews on our papers, but they also help us to provide authors feedback in excellent time. This ensures quality published research reaches our readership as soon as possible so it can then go on to inform future work in the immunology space.
Currently, for Clinical & Experimental Immunology, for 2025 we have a mean number of days to first decision of 18. For Discovery Immunology, we hold a mean number of days to first decision of 50 days and for Immunotherapy Advances, a mean of 41 days to first decision.
We will continue to provide quality peer review in good time to our authors for the years ahead. If you would like to get involved with our journals and become a reviewer, please get in touch with our journals team at journals@immunology.org.