Rethinking Peer Review

Rethinking Peer Review

Moderated by Josephine E. Sciortino, Editorial Director, Canadian Science Publishing

Josephine E. Sciortino is Editorial Director at Canadian Science Publishing, where she manages a team of journal development specialists in the Life & Agricultural Sciences portfolio. She has also taught at GWU - a course called The Professional Editor. She has worked in scholarly publishing for over 20 years with various biomedical societies in the management of their specialty journals, including the Canadian Urological Association Journal (as the inaugural managing editor) and the Canadian Medical Association Journal. She is an active volunteer at her local library and literacy group in Montreal, Canada, where she lives with her husband and 2 daughters.

Openness and the Ethics of Peer Engagement

Rebecca Kennison, Digital Content Editor, Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library, Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Scholarly communication values the open exchange of ideas, apart from traditional peer review. Peer engagement happens throughout the research process, both before and after publication, through interactions among colleagues, lab members, and the scholarly community. I advocate for a more open and transparent review process, one that enables not only open dialog between author(s) and reviewer(s) but that also ensures that thoughtful and substantive reviews are properly recognized and rewarded. The traditional role of peer review, designed to limit the number of pieces published, should evolve into that of peer engagement, viewing peer review as collaboration rather than gatekeeping. Reviews that improve the quality of a work and thus help to advance the field should be considered as contributions to existing scholarship, rather than merely service to the community.

Rebecca Kennison is the Digital Content Editor at the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC), responsible for delivering consistent and comprehensive digital content to the CUIMC community by leveraging the Health Sciences Library's expertise and technology. Past roles include that of executive director of the not-for-profit K|N Consultants and founding director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, a division of the Columbia University Libraries, where she was responsible for developing programs to facilitate scholarly research and the communication of that research through technology solutions. Rebecca has worked primarily in the academic publishing industry, including production leadership roles at Cell Press, Blackwell Publishing (now Wiley), and the open-access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS).

AI in the Academic Context: Intellectual Property, Peer-reviewing and Editors' challenges

Marco Giraldo Barreto, Editor in Chief, Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano

AIs are evolving at the speed of light, but little has been said about what the role of these new tools represent to academic research and what this irruption has meant to intellectual property, peer reviewing and, how we trust knowledge-building. By demonstrating examples of how ChatGPT works for specific cases on research, attendees will learn about challenges related to AI for academic research, and what steps editors should take to protect intellectual property, enhance peer-reviewing, and make the best out of these tools instead of fighting against them.

Marco Giraldo Barreto (he/his/him) is Editor in Chief, Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano. He has a BA in Modern Languages (Universidad de Caldas, Manizales, Colombia), Specialist in Intellectual Property Law (Universidad Sergio Arboleda, Bogotá, Colombia), and MA in Cultural Management and Production (Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Bogotá, Colombia). He has worked with institutions such as Editorial Norma, Universidad de Caldas, Universidad Santo Tomás and Cinemateca de Bogotá. He is also Executive Director of Asociación de Editoriales Universitarias de Colombia (ASEUC), the Association of Colombian University Presses.