Rapid and Open Peer Review [Webinar]

Date & Time: Sep 21, 2020 at 4pm GMT/UTC, 5pm WAT, 6PM CAT/SAST, 7pm EAT 

Description

As a contribution to Peer Review Week 2020, TCC Africa and AfricArXiv organise a webinar to take a deep dive into new technological developments towards Rapid and Open Peer Review. More than 300 publications (preprints and journal articles) are available online describing COVID-19 Research in and about Africa. What are the procedures to assess these studies for accuracy and coherence so that journalists, policy makers and interested individuals can learn from them and combat the virus?

Questions that were addressed during the webinar include:

• What are the new technologies for open and rapid peer review in academic publishing?

• How is open peer review improving quality assessment during COVID-19 research

• What incentives exist for researchers to assess other researchers' results?

• How can non-academic professionals engage in open peer review?

About Peer Review Week

Peer Review Week is a yearly global event celebrating the essential role that peer review plays in maintaining scientific quality. The event brings together individuals, institutions, and organizations committed to sharing the central message that good peer review, whatever shape or form it might take, is critical to scholarly communications.

Peer Review Week 2020 is taking place September 21 – 25, dedicated to the theme of “Trust in Peer Review”, shining a light on how the peer review process works and why it helps build trust in research. 

Target audience

Researchers, librarians, journal editors and other interested academics as well as non-academic individuals including journalists.

Confirmed speakers

• Stephanie Dawson, Science Open

• Antonio Tenorio Fornés, Decentralized Science

• Daniela Saderi, PREreview

• Gabriele Marinello, Qeios

• Denis Bourguet, Peer Community In …
  
  

  About TCC Africa

  The Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa), is the first African-based training centre to teach effective communication skills to scientists. TCC Africa is an award winning  Trust, established as a non-profit entity in 2006 and is registered in Kenya.  TCC Africa provides  capacity support in improving researchers  output and visibility through training in  scholarly and science communication.

  About AfricArXiv

  AfricArXiv is a community-led digital archive for African research communication. We provide a platform to upload working papers, preprints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), presentations, and data sets via our partner platforms. We aim to foster research and collaboration among African scientists, enhance the visibility of African research output and increase collaboration globally.

  To ensure the discoverability of African research output on a global level, we work with established scholarly repository services, namely the Open Science Framework provided by the Center for Open Science, Zenodo, PubPub, and ScienceOpen.

  AfricArXiv explores different solutions to enable the peer review process on the preprint level. 

  • The Open Science Framework has hypothes.is integrated for commenting on the preprint manuscript

  • PubPub has their own commenting feature 

  • ScienceOpen provides a standardized Peer Review process which Stephanie will tell us more about. 

  Submissions to AfricArXiv undergo a quality check for relevance to the African context, if the author list is complete, affiliation, the right license applied, methodology, data set (if applicable), and list of references comply with citation styles. Upon acceptance of the manuscript we encourage authors to use the services provided by our partners that specialize in Peer Review, such as the ones presented here today.

  We plan to work with Qeios, Decentralized Science, PREreview, and Peer Community In… to streamline the publishing workflow from submission of a preprint via peer review to journal publishing.

  The role of AfricArXiv in Peer Review: info.africarxiv.org/peer-review/