Recognizing and Rewarding Peer Review of Scholarly Articles, Books, and Funding Proposals: Recommendations by the CoARA Working Group on Recognizing and Rewarding Peer Review

In this pre-endorsed publication, the CoARA Working Group on Recognizing and Rewarding Peer Review calls for systemic efforts to  acknowledge, and appropriately reward, peer review as integral to the research ecosystem and a critical scholarly contribution--and provides recommendations on how to institute such reforms.

Peer review is fundamental to the scientific method but remains largely invisible in research assessment. This document provides targeted recommendations for different stakeholder groups, including research-performing organizations (RPOs), research-funding organizations (RFOs), publishers/editors, and individual researchers,  such as issuing verifiable certificates, providing protected time for peer review, developing digital infrastructures for crediting review activities (e.g. ORCID integration), and including peer review in performance reviews and job evaluations. The recommendations aim to start a much-needed conversation within academia on how to make visible this key pillar of the scientific endeavour.