Conclusion
All journals, regardless of discipline, business model, publisher or
location, benefit from completing the Self-Assessment tool which is
freely available to the scholarly journal publishing community. It gives
journals an opportunity to reflect on their peer review practices and to
consider how they can improve in areas where they may be relatively
weak, in the spirit of providing greater quality in the practice of peer
review. The model responses illustrating best practice, which we have
synthesized can be shared with journals after they have completed the
Self-Assessment, provide an invaluable resource for other journals to
guide them in providing a high quality peer review service for their
authors. Rather than being complacent about their current practice, and
acknowledging that most journals may employ best practice in some areas,
journals always have room for improvement, particularly with changing
expectations in subject communities and advances in technology. In this
respect there is a great opportunity for publishers to be influencers
and early adopters of process change. The Self-Assessment has
limitations, notably that not all questions are appropriate to all
subject communities, however, we believe the general approach can help
journal teams – whether editors, managing editors, reviewers or
publishers – to reflect in depth on their peer review processes, to
identify areas of weakness in those processes, to highlight gaps in
knowledge of technical solutions that exist to improve the processes,
and to draw attention to inconsistencies in the way that journals
communicate with authors, reviewers and editors.