Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Reviewing for PeerJ: it's the little (and the not so little) things

I just did my first review for PeerJ and it was a real pleasure because there are a lot of "little things" that make your reviewing life easier:

1. Figures/tables are in the text and, get this, the captions are immediately above/below the corresponding figure/table.  Some other journals also do this, but not enough.

2. I annotate the mss in a pdf reader and usually this is a frustrating experience since the publisher generated pdf has all sorts of "quirks" that make highlighting and copying text hit and miss.  The previous pdf I reviewed turned every page with a figure into an image!  Annotating/copying in the PeerJ pdf worked flawlessly.

3. The pdf contained a 3 front pages with the due date, a summary of the review criteria, a link to the page with the supplementary material, and a link to the page where I should submit my review.  No hunting around for the email with the link! I teared up a little bit when I saw that.

Other "little things" include stuff like not having to rank the perceived importance or impact of the work on some bogus 1-10 scale, a strict policy on making the raw data available, and a button to click to make my review non-anonymous.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

No comments: