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Unlock ways to share data on peer review

Journals, funders and scholars must work together to create an infrastructure to study peer review.
  1. Flaminio Squazzoni

    1. Flaminio Squazzoni is director of the BehaveLAB at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, Italy.

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  2. Petra Ahrweiler

    1. Petra Ahrweiler is a professor at the University of Mainz, Germany.

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  3. Tiago Barros

    1. Tiago Barros is a product lead at Publons, London, UK.

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  4. Federico Bianchi

    1. Federico Bianchi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Brescia, Italy.

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  5. Aliaksandr Birukou

    1. Aliaksandr Birukou is editorial director, computer science at Springer Nature, Heidelberg, Germany.

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  6. Harry J. J. Blom

    1. Harry J. J. Blom is vice-president, publishing development, and head of the editorial department in astronomy at Springer Nature, New York, USA.

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  7. Giangiacomo Bravo

    1. Giangiacomo Bravo is a professor at the Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden.

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  8. Stephen Cowley

    1. Stephen Cowley is a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.

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  9. Virginia Dignum

    1. Virginia Dignum is a professor at Umeå University, Sweden.

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  10. Pierpaolo Dondio

    1. Pierpaolo Dondio is a lecturer at the Technological University Dublin, Ireland

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  11. Francisco Grimaldo

    1. Francisco Grimaldo is vice-dean of the School of Engineering at the University of Valencia, Spain.

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  12. Lynsey Haire

    1. Lynsey Haire is head of electronic editorial systems at Taylor & Francis Group, Oxford, UK.

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  13. Jason Hoyt

    1. Jason Hoyt is co-founder and chief executive officer at PeerJ, London, UK.

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  14. Phil Hurst

    1. Phil Hurst is publisher at the Royal Society, London, UK.

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  15. Rachael Lammey

    1. Rachael Lammey is head of community outreach at Crossref, Oxford, UK.

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  16. Catriona MacCallum

    1. Catriona MacCallum is director of open science at Hindawi, London, UK.

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  17. Ana Marušić

    1. Ana Marušić is chair of the Department of Research in Biomedicine and Health at the University of Split School of Medicine, Croatia.

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  18. Bahar Mehmani

    1. Bahar Mehmani is reviewer experience lead in the Global Publishing Development Department at Elsevier, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

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  19. Hollydawn Murray

    1. Hollydawn Murray is data project lead at F1000 Research, London, UK.

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  20. Duncan Nicholas

    1. Duncan Nicholas is director of DN Journal Publishing Services, Brighton, UK.

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  21. Giorgio Pedrazzi

    1. Giorgio Pedrazzi is an assistant professor at the University of Brescia, Italy.

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  22. Iratxe Puebla

    1. Iratxe Puebla is senior managing editor at PLoS ONE, Cambridge, UK.

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  23. Peter Rodgers

    1. Peter Rodgers is features editor of e-Life, Cambridge, UK.

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  24. Tony Ross-Hellauer

    1. Tony Ross-Hellauer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Know-Center, Graz, Austria.

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  25. Marco Seeber

    1. Marco Seeber is an associate professor at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway.

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  26. Kalpana Shankar

    1. Kalpana Shankar is a professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin, Ireland.

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  27. Joris Van Rossum

    1. Joris Van Rossum is research data director at the International Association of STM Publishers, Oxford, UK.

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  28. Michael Willis

    1. Michael Willis is EMEA regional manager of peer review at Wiley, Oxford, UK.

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Cartoon of peer reviewers emerging from sealed tin handing their data to wise owls for analysis

Illustration by David Parkins

Peer review is the defining feature of scholarly communication. In a 2018 survey of more than 11,000 researchers, 98% said that they considered peer review important or extremely important for ensuring the quality and integrity of scholarly communication1. Indeed, now that the Internet and social media have assumed journals’ original role of dissemination, a journal’s main function is curation.

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Nature 578, 512-514 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00500-y

Authors A.B. and H.J.J.B. are employees of Springer Nature (which publishes Nature); Nature is editorially independent of its publisher.

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