Speaker 1: Hello everyone and welcome to another insightful conversation as part of an exclusive interview series celebrating peer review week with ACSE. Today we are discussing a topic that has reshaped the way we approach peer review, that is virtual peer review platforms, convenience or complexity. And I'm thrilled to have Lizzie Daves from PEA editorial with us today, an expert in this field, to share her thoughts. Lizzie, thank you for joining us today. So to begin, could you tell us a little bit about your professional background and how you become

Speaker 2: involved in the peer review process? Of course, yeah. So I originally started working with my mum actually. So she worked for Sheffield University alongside two professors who were editors of academic journals and they asked her to work alongside them managing the peer review process of their academic journals. So this is post-virtual peer review platforms, so it was a very paper-based system at the time. She was working with them for several years and really enjoyed it and basically began her own small editorial business. She worked on her own probably for about 20 years doing that and was quite successful with the different editors that she worked with and different publishers. I was predominantly working in sales and in customer service with some prestige global brands across the world, nothing to do with academic publishing, nothing to do with peer review, but still had quite a love for admin and people management and organisation. So that's kind of where my skill set really, really came from. And I was looking for a bit of a career change and my mum offered to train me in ScholarOne, an editorial manager, and see if I liked it, see if I got on with peer review. I have to admit at the time I had no idea what peer review management was. It was all completely new to me, it wasn't something that I'd been involved in at all, so it was very exciting and I loved it and I loved working with the editors and reviewers and authors. I loved the collaboration of the journal teams. So we grew a business from that point onwards. I went up to being full-time working across multiple journals and then one of the larger publishers came to us and said, right, you know, have you got capacity to take on these six new journals? And we thought, oh no, we haven't got any space, what are we going to do? So we started working with other editorial assistants in the industry and they came and worked with us and we grew into PA Editorial. So we started doing that in 2010 and so we've been going for about 14 years now, working with various different publishers, managing approximately 200 journals and I think we have a team probably of about 95 editorial assistants working with us at the moment, so lots of industry experience across the board within our team. But yeah, very exciting, I love the collaboration of the industry, it's been a fantastic learning experience.

Speaker 1: That's interesting. So moving forward to my first question for the interview, as you've seen that peer review platforms have gained a significant traction in recent years, in your experience working in PA Editorial, do you see these platforms primarily as a tool of convenience or do they introduce a new layer of complexity to the peer review process?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question and something that we're all striving for the right answer for, I think, at the moment. Obviously when Pat first started in the 90s, there weren't editorial systems or they were just starting to come around. She was anonymising copies of manuscripts by sort of Blue Peter style, cutting out the names of the authors and reviewers and posting them out by, you know, actual mail to the reviewers for them to look over. I asked Pat actually how long it would take using that method from acceptance to final decision and interestingly, it's quite journal dependent, but despite the lack of sort of email and manuscript systems at that time, the process kind of roughly took the same amount of time as it does today. So even with all the technological advancements that we've got now, it's quite hard to believe that we haven't really speeded things up in the process that much. But that's obviously not to say that technology hasn't changed things a great deal because it really has. In those days, obviously editors received a lot lower number of submissions, less frequently. They also weren't under as much pressure as we are now. So reviewers were contacted via mail. They weren't bombarded with reviewer requests flying into their email boxes every few weeks. They could take the manuscripts they received on their train journeys and mark them up with a pen and send them back at their leisure, which I know laptops and iPads offer the same benefits, but I think it came with a sort of slower pace and ability to process that information a bit better. So I'm not saying that that was a perfect way of doing it. I think that's far from the truth, but the technological advancements that we see today really do allow for a wider dissemination of research, which is certainly a positive. But it does come with its pitfalls. We have the benefits though now of things like authenticate, so we can easily identify plagiarism. I don't think paper mills were so much of an issue in that sort of time. We didn't really see that many fake or manipulated articles, but it's certainly grown into a much bigger problem now that we've got better access to research content. But with the introduction of AI, which is a huge thing, isn't it, that we can talk about now, we can identify potential conflicts of interest, suggest suitable reviewers, analyse manuscripts for inconsistencies, unclear language, et cetera, et cetera. So I think all the journals that we work on receiving thousands of manuscripts a year, would it be possible to handle all those manuscripts if we weren't using a submission system? I think the answer is probably no. I think it certainly adds to the benefit of that.

Speaker 1: Exactly. So moving forward, as someone deeply involved in the editorial processes and having a good enough experience in that field, what challenges do you think that reviewers and editors face when transitioning from traditional peer review methods to virtual

Speaker 2: platforms? I think the biggest issue that we face when supporting journals moving from traditional methods onto virtual platforms is the resistance to change. It's a significant challenge. They're accustomed to traditional methods, paper-based reviews and email exchanges, they may resist transitioning to the digital system. Even those willing to embrace the change face quite a steep learning curve with technology and understanding how those systems work. I think the impersonal nature of virtual platforms is often something that people are fearful of, with automated notifications and not receiving that personal one-to-one contact. It's certainly something that we try and create more of a personal interaction with reviewers and editors and authors as much as possible. I think reviewer fatigue is a growing concern as well, with more and more reviewers receiving numerous, countless emails into their mailboxes, and as more journals adopt those platforms and the convenience of online platforms, it's increasing the volume of submissions and it's overwhelming the reviewers as well.

Speaker 1: Exactly. On the other side, the virtual peer review platforms no doubt offer many benefits when it comes to things such as global accessibility and streamlining the processes and making things faster than ever. However, do you think that these platforms risk depersonalising the peer review process and how we can ensure that human connection remains a part of this?

Speaker 2: I think going back to your previous question, that is one of the main concerns that everybody is facing, this depersonalisation using a system and it not having that connection that we had potentially before. They do streamline the process, they offer several advantages such as global accessibility and efficiency, but this risk of depersonalising the process as the interactions become automated is huge. So there's personalised feedback, so encouraging reviewers to provide personalised and constructive feedback, rather than just solely using automated or pre-set up responses. This can help maintain the human touch. Creating guidelines for reviewers to include those detailed comments and suggestions for authors, so guiding the reviewers in assisting them and how we can make these reviews more personal. Obviously there's some systems offering open peer review, which is where the authors and reviewers can interact more collaboratively and openly, and that really fosters communication between the two different participants within that process. I think reviewer recognition is certainly something that we are facing an issue with. We're asking so much of these reviewers, how can we recognise their skills, how can we recognise what they're doing for the journal, so do we use certificates or badges, or how can we nurture that, so I think that's something certainly that we want to focus on really. So in your opinion, looking forward towards

Speaker 1: the future, how do you envision that the virtual peer review platform is evolving, and what innovations do you think would make these platforms more effective for both reviewers,

Speaker 2: author, and I would say the editors also? Yeah, and I think again AI is huge at the moment. Every conference I've been to, every webinar I've attended, AI plays a huge part in the development of our systems and processes and how it's going to affect us. I've just been to a conference last week and it was interesting to hear from different stakeholders across the industry that we should be guiding the software developers to tell them what we need. So there's this fear amongst the industry that AI is going to create something that is going to take away our jobs, or it's going to replicate what we should be doing as humans, but actually there's so much that AI can do that can encourage and support us in our roles to take away the more mundane tasks as it were, and support us with providing great research and disseminating that information. I think we'll see interactive manuscript formats could be something that will transform into the new way of working, so rather than static comments, reviewers might be able to make real-time annotations or suggestions directly within the document, and this would be able to sort of support collaboration between the reviewer and the author. Back to reviewer fatigue, I think better incentives for reviewers such as digital badges or certificates, or even sort of blockchain-based recognition systems that track reviewer contributions. Multilingual support, sorry I could go on forever, I think there's so much, do you want me to stop?

Speaker 1: All right, so wrapping up, my last question, what are your thoughts on this year's theme of innovation and technology in peer review in general, and how do you see the Peer Review Week platform itself is contributing to the field? I think innovation and technology is something that

Speaker 2: we're all, you know, really keen to understand more of at the moment. Every conference, like I say, every webinar has been filled with information surrounding innovation and technology, so it's it's a hot topic, it's exactly what we need to be talking about in Peer Review Week, and for an industry that's been following sort of traditional methods for so long, it's quite an exciting prospect for us all to explore these new systems and workflows that are more accessible and potentially can be tailored to our every need. I think Peer Review Week is crucial to the industry, it provides us all with the opportunity to come together no matter where you are, what you do, what part of the business or industry you're in, and it gives us the opportunity to discuss all

Speaker 1: things peer review. Thank you so much Lizzie for sharing your invaluable insights into the growing role of virtual platforms in peer review, and while talking to you I think it's clear that while these platforms offer significant convenience, there are also being a lot of complexities that really really require critical consideration. So thank you once again for joining us today and it was a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you, thank you very much.