It’s been one year since we restarted ReviewerCredits. I know: Time flies when you’re having fun! Seriously though, now’s the time to look back over one year of the all new revamped, revitalized, and repositioned ReviewerCredits, take a quick look at what worked well, and note some imminent new partnerships which will take us to the next level supporting peer reviewers.
One thing is very clear: although peer review is perhaps the most engaging part of the academic publication cycle, this process remains a massive pain point for researchers as well as for journal editors and publishers. Indeed, peer review, especially when it has involved ‘bad actors’ (eg. poorly managed or even fraudulent peer review reports on published papers leading to article retractions), has been especially prominent in the publishing industry news this year.
ReviewerCredits sits at the forefront of developments in peer review (and therefore publishing) as we provide a clear and innovative solution to verification, reward via credits, and recognition. Our unique 2-factor authentication, including via ORCID iD integration, means that researchers signed-up and verified on ReviewerCredits ‘are who they say they are’ and can be matched via our unique Reviewer Graph with editors and journals to enhance their careers first through peer review and then rewards and recognition.
I’m proud of the small but active team at ReviewerCredits. Five of us recently got together in Berlin for our quarterly progress meeting, looked over our achievements from the last 12 months, had a lot of fun and even did a little work!
Just one short year ago, ReviewerCredits had 20,000 registered users. We now have exceeded 25,000. What’s more important: Reviewers on ReviewerCredits got much more active than before, the engagement rate grew by a factor of 4!
Our social media and researcher-facing marketing has been organic, growing from 800 to over 2,000 followers. And how proud are we of our unique Ambassador Programme, with supporters around the world. ReviewerCredits’ Ambassadors advocate for our platform in their regions and are all well-established, well-published researchers (and therefore peer reviewers) in their own right. We are working with our network of Ambassadors on exciting ideas, developing for example mentoring programmes for younger early career researchers and to run other networking events.
ReviewerCredits is not “only” fully digital: Over the past months, we have shown our human faces to researchers and publishers alike, achieving very significant registrations for webinars and other networking events. Our so far entirely organic approach to marketing has proven highly successful (after all, researchers don’t engage well with slick marketing, endless emails, and banners on their searches!).
In April, we re-launched the ReviewerCredits Reward Center, now providing some of the best products and services for researcher-reviewers at the best possible prices and discounts. New offerings include an on demand training course for peer reviewers which consists of five parts.
Stay tuned for our ReviewerCredits contributions to Peer Review Week 2023: We are running several webinars and will be making a number of other exciting announcements which I am sure will excite you.
And as always: We have a lot of ideas and plans for ReviewerCredits – please share your thoughts around peer review with us so we can work towards making them happen together. Please reach out to me at [email protected].
Sven