Case study | AVES AVES harnesses the power of Publons
How investing in peer review helped an independent publisher’s journals succeed
AVES is an Istanbul-based publisher of academic journals mainly in the field of "We are a team of 15 medicine and social sciences, in accordance with international guidelines. Through people and our goal its experienced team of experts and partnerships with numerous universities, is to make sure that learned societies, and other non-profit organisations, AVES publishes more than the journals we publish 30 open access journals as of 2020. are author-friendly, The organisation’s primary goal is to help their clients improve their journals to become reviewer-friendly high-impact publications, that are well accepted by the international academic and that they have a community in their respective field. considerable impact Structuring their clients’ editorial workflow and advising on their journal’s peer review in their field." processes is an integral part of AVES’ services. For this, they have been relying on Clarivate’s solutions for the past 10 years. Ali Sahin, Publications Director, AVES
The challenge AVES wanted to ensure timely publication of their journals – a way to speed up the preview process to help AVES needed an easier way to find and researchers meet their maximum potential. incentivise reviewers to work with them. AVES needed to protect their strong It was becoming increasingly difficult community of journals and authors. for AVES to find motivated, reliable and available peer reviewers. “If you speed up the peer-review process, you make authors happy, and Before Publons™, journal editors would look for if authors are happy, they will bring reviewers via search engines such as PubMed. in more quality papers” says Ali. This was a time-consuming process as editors had to scan through each paper in order to find the author’s contact information. This took away the editor’s focus from other tasks "In the past, related to the management of the journals. our clients tried With the rapid growth in submissions to scholarly journals, AVES became aware a number of ways of the increasing demand for a peer reviewer’s time and effort and realised to motivate peer that not taking action would threaten their client’s ability to deliver impactful and reviewers. None trusted research quickly and efficiently. of which worked." How to recognise a reviewer for their hard work, dedication and expertise remained an issue that AVES needed a solution for. Ali Sahin, Publications Director, AVES
The solution For reviewers who opt-in to the service, their Publons profile is automatically updated with a verified record of the review performed, in full AVES partnered with Publons in 2018 to help compliance with the journal’s editorial policies improve the quality and efficiency of their and without revealing any sensitive information. peer review processes for 17 of their journals. By subscribing to Reviewer Connect and To extend touch points with reviewers and Reviewer Recognition Service, they were increase engagement, Publons notifies able to take a more proactive approach to reviewers when and where the paper they finding reviewers, improving the reviewer reviewed is published, pointing them to experience and building more effective the article on the journal’s platform. relationships with the community. The tool also makes it possible to Reviewer Connect enables AVES to: recognise past reviews and engage with past peer reviewers. • Perform powerful searches: Publons’ algorithm trawls the extensive Web of AVES actively uses the partner dashboard Science™ publication and citation index, to monitor the performance of their and Publons' exclusive review database to Publons partnership, track reviewer return up to 30 precise recommendations uptake and satisfaction with the service from over 7-million authors. Editors are and leverage unique insights and analytics now able to search using parameters about their reviewers’ preferences, such as title, abstract, journal name, demographics, and behaviour. authors and exclude researchers.
• Get a 360° view of suggested reviewers: The tool enables editors to choose the right "We started to use review candidates based on publications matched to search, research fields, Reviewer Connect biography and institutional affiliations, current availability to review and more. and Reviewer
• Reliably contact prospective reviewers: Recognition to help Journals now have access to a researcher’s latest contact email address from Web us with our main of Science, as well as one-click access to trusted sources for contact information. challenges of a)
Reviewer Recognition Service offers finding the right reviewers a way to effortlessly track and verify all their peer review contributions reviewer and b) for participating journals. Reviewers now receive a “Thank you for reviewing” incentivising them." email from the editorial office that includes an offer to get recognition on Publons for their valuable work. Ali Sahin, Publications Director, AVES
The value Helped improve the quality of papers.
Authors of journals started receiving better Easier and quicker to find relevant quality feedback faster, which resulted in and available reviewers. researchers producing better quality content. Through Publons, AVES are able to speed up Reviewer Recognition Service reduces the overall peer review times and get publications amount of time spent looking for reviewers. out faster, improving the experience for The tool became so popular amongst submitting authors. Reviewers not only the community that reviewers started to significantly appreciated the extra recognition pick publishers that had partnered with for their work but also showed a greater such modern solutions, making it easier willingness to review and submit manuscripts for AVES to connect with reviewers and to journals managed by AVES. improve the overall peer review process. Retained clients by reducing “editor burnout”. Created process efficiencies for editors. By investing in a modern peer review solution such as Publons to support their clients, Publons greatly reduces the editor’s AVES saw editors staying longer in their jobs. administrative workload of recruiting “Through our company, journals now have reviewers. Editors of journals with AVES access to a reviewer recognition service. now have more time and capacity to focus It makes our clients happy and we are able on other tasks such as finding better papers to retain them thanks to Publons” says Ali. and improving the quality of the journal in other ways. The reduced time commitment also makes it easier to recruit new editors.
The tool makes it easier for smaller teams to manage larger (>1000 submissions) journals while also enabling smaller (<100 submissions) journals to reach 15K out to international researchers. reviewers, 35K reviews (90% increase since partnership with Publons) "We recommend all journals sign up to Publons to manage 41% their peer review uptake rate in 2020 process. It is a must- (+20% year on year) have for journals if they want to provide good quality peer review." 8.7 rating out of 10 for reviewer Ali Sahin, Publications Director, AVES satisfaction in 2020 WS561016492 / 07 efficiency to their peer review processes. review peer to their efficiency transparency, quality, recognition, and greater bring publishers to help designed solutions review of peer arange has Publons they deserve. recognition the reviewers give peer their them to help publishers academic To with this we do partner contributions. review peer hidden often for their recognition get researchers to help as aplace built was first Publons Publons with partnering Learn about more are trademarks of their respective owners and used under license. under used and owners respective their of trademarks are herein used trademarks other all as well as logo, its and Clarivate Clarivate. © 2020 clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup &Turkey) Africa North East, (Middle +971 352 4536 today: experts our Contact [email protected] here for publishers services our about more Learn journals. world’s of the scholarly thousands with is partnered Publons .