PLOS iGEM Realtime Peer Review Jamboree – take part!
On February 23rd PLOS and iGEM will be holding the second Realtime Peer Review Jamboree and we’d like YOU to take part in reviewing iGEM Project Reports and Research Papers. The all-day event will be hosted on the PLOS Syn Bio Breezio platform where papers – and their authors – will be waiting for feedback from the community to help improve their write ups. We hope that synthetic biologists from around the world will lend their expertise to these early career researchers in an innovative peer review experience where reviewers and authors can have realtime conversations which will ultimately clarify and improve the papers submitted. Last year we had over 80 people online at once providing over 400 comments and discussions to the submissions, and we’d love to beat those numbers this year.
Here’s how it works: once signed up, reviewers can post their reports as inline comments on specific sections of an article, or comment on the work as a whole. Members of the author team will then be able to respond, ask for further clarification, request recommendations, and so on. Anyone can jump into a conversation at any time, which should lead to stimulating discussion, new ideas and strengthening of the iGEM teams’ work. For more information and guidelines on providing helpful reviews, take a look at this post. You can also watch a video of tips and advice for the online peer review jamboree here.
We’ve had a great response from iGEM teams and have an exciting range of submissions from across the world. In order to make this event a success, we would love to encourage everyone who is interested in synthetic biology or in peer review to sign up as a reviewer and get involved on 23rd February from 11am-6pm GMT.
Register on the platform to take part and read more about the project in the PLOS Welcome Room.