PEERE Conference 2020 – Programme

The 2nd PEERE International Conference on Peer Review 2020 will be celebrated as a fully open virtual event on 29 September – 1 October 2020.

A repository of video presentations and live streaming sessions will be available at https://underline.io. Just create an account and enjoy the conference for free!

Pre-recorded talks about accepted contributions will be made public on 28 September distributed in different thematic tracks, so they can be consumed on-demand and discussed during the following query and answer sessions:

Tuesday, 29 September 2020

Venue: Conference site on Underline (create your account for free)

14:00 – 15:00 (CET)Keynote talk: Sara Schroter (BMJ)
15:00 – 16:00 (CET)Q&A Session 1: Peer review procedures & trials
Chair: Bahar Mehmani, Elsevier
  • Journal guidelines: What they can and cannot do. Serge Horbach, Wytske Hepkema, Joyce Hoek and Willem Halffman.
  • Effect of an editorial intervention to improve the completeness of reporting of randomised trials: a randomised controlled trial. David Blanco, Sara Schroter, Adrian Aldcroft, David Moher, Isabelle Boutron, Jamie Kirkham and Erik Cobo.
  • Results from a peer-review trial at eLife. Emma Smith and Andy Collings.
  • Do Words Matter? Increasing buy-in by building trust with peer reviewers on Publons and ORCID. Imogen Rose, Katie Allin, Uwe Schwab, Matthew Hayes and Edmund Gerstner.
  • A peer review programme for mental health service users. Joan Marsh, Niall Boyce and Vanessa Pinfold.
16:00 – 16:15 (CET)Break
16:15 – 17:30 (CET)Q&A Session 2: Peer review metrics and data analysis
Chair: Mario Malički, Stanford University
  • Who reviews for predatory and legitimate journals? A study on reviewer characteristics. Anna Severin, Michaela Strinzel, Marc Domingo and Tiago Barros.
  • Man, senior, targeting prestigious journals: Is this the identikit of the big fish in the peer review pond? An empirical study on 157 scholarly journals. Mike Farjam, Giangiacomo Bravo, Francisco Grimaldo, Flaminio Squazzoni.
  • Peer review of doctoral dissertations: Gender differences in getting cum laude. Peter Van Den Besselaar, Charlie Mom and Tijs Van den Broek.
  • Peer reviewers’ opinions: low agreement in every dimension of internally consistent reports. Judith Hartstein.
  • Metrics and peer review agreement at the institutional level. Vincent Antonio Traag, Marco Malgarini and Scipione Sarlo.
  • Tracking the developmental value of peer review in a sample of scholarly journals from the Royal Society, 2006-2016. Daniel Garcia-Costa, Federico Bianchi, Francisco Grimaldo, Phil Hurst, Flaminio Squazzoni.

Wednesday, 30 September 2020

Venue: Conference site on Underline (create your account for free)

14:00 – 15:00 (CET)Panel Session 1: Remodeling peer review in light of preprints
Organizer: ​Jessica Polka, Executive Director, ASAPbio
Panelists: Emily Chenette (PLOS), Marjolaine Hamelin (INRAE), Sowmya Swaminathan (Springer Nature), Sara Monado (EMBO)
15:00 – 16:00 (CET)Q&A Session 3: Peering into peer review
Chair: Peter Van Den Besselaar, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
  • A standard taxonomy for peer review: presentation of the final version. Joris van Rossum.
  • Investigation of moral bias in peer review using large-scale linguistic analysis approach. Ivan Buljan, Daniel Garcia-Costa, Francisco Grimaldo, Flaminio Squazzoni and Ana Marušić.
  • Changing the shoulders I am standing on! Describing the changes that occurred in publications’ reference lists after peer review. Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Dimity Stephen, Judith Hartstein and Christophe Heger.
  • Psychometric testing of ARCADIA, a tool for assessing peer review report quality in biomedical research. Cecilia Superchi, Ketevan Glonti, Sara Schroter, Josep Anton Sànchez Espigares, Alessandro Recchioni, Darko Hren, Isabelle Boutron and José Antonio González.
  • Are public comments on preprints a form of peer review? Preliminary analysis of bioRxiv comments. Mario Malički, Lauren A. Maggio and Juan Pablo Alperin.
  • Improving gender equity and diversity at Lancet journals. Joan Marsh, Jocalyn Clark, Ashley Cooper and Ludmila M. Sheytanova.
16:00 – 16:15 (CET)Break
16:15 – 17:15 (CET)Lightning session 1
Chair: Ana Marušić, University of Split
  • Software scaffolds for quality feedback in peer review. Oscar Diaz, Jeremías P. Contell and Haritz Medina.
  • The challenges of finding peer reviewers: insights from our product design research. Antonio Tenorio Fornés and Elena Pérez Tirador.
  • Peer Review in Legal journals. Jadranka Stojanovski, Ginevra Peruginelli and Elias Sanz-Casado.
  • In Review on Research Square: a journal-integrated preprint system for Springer Nature. Michele Avissar-Whiting, Sowmya Swaminathan, Juliet Kaplan and Rachel Burley.
  • Introducing a Data Accessibility Policy for journals at IOP Publishing: Measuring the impact on authors and editorial teams. Jade Holt and Andrew Walker.
17:15 – 18:15 (CET)Lightning session 2
Chair: Jadranka Stojanovski, University of Zadar
  • A Content Exploration of Reviewers’ Comments in FP7 Marie Curie ITN evaluation reports. Darko Hren, David Pina, Cristopher Norman and Ana Marusic.
  • Platform for Responsible Editorial Policies. Wytske Hepkema, Serge Horbach and Willem Halffman.
  • Decision-making approaches to grant funding allocation: insights from a realist synthesis. Alejandra Recio-Saucedo, Ksenia Kurbatskaya, Kathryn Fackrell, Katie Meadmore, Abby Bull, Simon Fraser and Amanda Blatch-Jones.
  • Identification and comparison of key criteria of funding decision feedback to applicants: A funder and applicant perspective. Kathryn Fackrell, Katie Meadmore, Alejandra Recio Saucedo, Abby Bull, Ksenia Kurbatskaya, Simon Fraser and Amanda Blatch-Jones.
  • Statistics in Peer Reviewed Journals. Anabel Forte, Daniel García-Costa, Emilia López-Iñesta, Flaminio Squazzoni, Phil Hurst, Francisco Grimaldo.

Thursday, 1 October 2020

Venue: Conference site on Underline (create your account for free)

14:00 – 15:00 (CET)Panel Session 2: Peer review in the post-COVID era
Organizer: ​Francisco Grimaldo, University of Valencia
Panelists: Bahar Mehmani (Elsevier), Michael Willis (Wiley), Duncan Nicholas (EASE), Flaminio Squazzoni (University of Milan)
15:00 – 16:00 (CET)Q&A Session 4: Peer review of grant proposals
Chair: Marco Seeber, University of Agder
  • Peer Reviews’ Prediction in Proposals’ Funding Success: A Sentiment Analysis of Grant Reviews. Junwen Luo, Olalere Alabi, Thomas Feliciani, Pablo Lucas and Kalpana Shankar.
  • How to improve the quality of grant proposal review? The exercise of responsible peer review in Taiwan. Carey Ming-Li Chen, Wen-Chi Hung and Kai-Lin Chi.
  • Reviewers’ agreement and scores in Marie Curie proposals from 2007 to 2018. David Pina, Darko Hren, Ivan Buljan, and Ana Marušić.
  • Meta Research: Ethics assessment of H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowships. Ivan Buljan, David Pina and Ana Marušić.
  • Reviewers’ traits affecting disagreement in proposal evaluation. Insights from Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions and COST actions. Marco Seeber, Jef Vlegels, David Pina, Elwin Reimink and Ana Marušić.
  • Feedback to improve inter-rater reliability in grant peer review: A randomized controlled trial. Jan-Ole Hesselberg and Ida Svege.
16:00 – 16:15 (CET)Break
16:15 – 17:15 (CET)Q&A Session 5: Computational studies of peer review
Chair: Simone Righi (University College London)
  • Introduction to the session.Karoly Takacs (Linköping University)
  • Challenges in Using Bibliometric Indicators to Assess Peer Review Decisions: A Simulation Model. Kwun Hang Lai, Ludo Waltman and Vincent Traag.
  • Hacking one’s way to peer-review. Gayanga B. Herath, Davide Secchi and Stephen J. Cowley.
  • Does social influence matter in peer review? Thomas Feliciani, Kalpana Shankar, Pablo Lucas and Junwen Luo.
  • Honest Signaling in Academic Publishing. Leonid Tiokhin, Karthik Panchanathan, Daniel Lakens, Simine Vazire, Thomas Morgan and Kevin Zollman.
  • Journal Competition and the Sustainability of Peer Review: An Agent-Based Model. Carmen Ibanescu, Simone Righi, Karoly Takacs and Elena Vallino.
  • Local versus global inter-rater reliability for evaluating the internal validity of grant peer review: Considerations of measurement. Elena A. Erosheva, Patrícia Martinková and Carole J. Lee.
17:15 – 18:00 (CET)Panel Session 3: Policy lessons from social simulation & the future of peer review modelling
Organizer: Thomas Feliciani, University College Dublin
Panelists: Bruce Edmonds (University of Manchester), Kalpana Shankar (University College Dublin), Flaminio Squazzoni (University of Milan)