STM and NISO To Collaborate on Peer Review Taxonomy
Baltimore, MD | July 15, 2021
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and STM, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers have announced the formation of a new NISO Working Group to formalize the Peer Review Taxonomy as an ANSI/NISO standard, following approval of the project by NISO Voting Members in late June. NISO invites volunteers to join the soon-to-be-formed Working Group, which will be merged with the existing STM Working Group.
In 2019, STM recognized the need to support the industry in ensuring greater transparency and openness in peer review, which is an essential element of Open Science. This support includes harmonizing and better communicating definitions of discrete elements of these processes, so that members of the community—whether they be authors, reviewers, editors or readers—can quickly and easily recognize how to more productively participate in the creation and qualification of scholarly content. An STM Working Group was formed, which developed standard definitions and best practice recommendations for the communication of peer review processes, now available in its version 2.0 form. NISO will now take on this output and further develop it into a version 3.0, which will be made available for public comment and then published as a formal ANSI/NISO standard once it has been reviewed and approved by NISO Voting Members.
“The Peer Review Taxonomy work has already made great progress in terms of scope and definitions,” commented Joris van Rossum, STM Director, Research Integrity. “Peer review is a crucial process in scholarly communication and a pillar of the scientific method. It is critical that publishers have the necessary tools and capabilities to better implement the number of new peer review models that are being developed, and transparently communicate the applied models to authors, reviewers and consumers of scholarly content on both journal and article level. The STM Working Group’s phased development and testing of the standard terminology for peer review has yielded many lessons that we are eager to refine in the NISO work, so that the eventual standard is as practical and useful as possible.”
“NISO is pleased to be able to contribute to this work and support increased community adoption of the Peer Review Taxonomy through formal standardization,” said Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. “We recognize that an open and transparent ecosystem requires full participation from its stakeholders for effective implementation; the ANSI/NISO standardization process includes many of these tenets itself, so the Peer Review Taxonomy has found a fitting home for its next steps and future work. We invite interested individuals from organizations involved in peer review activities to participate in the NISO Working Group.”
For more information about the Working Group, or to volunteer to participate, please contact Nettie Lagace, NISO’s Associate Executive Director, at nlagace@niso.org.
About These Organizations
About NISO
Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.
About STM
At STM we support our members in their mission to advance trusted research worldwide. Our over 140 members based in over 20 countries around the world collectively publish 66% of all journal articles and tens of thousands of monographs and reference works. As academic and professional publishers, learned societies, university presses, start-ups and established players we work together to serve society by developing standards and technology to ensure research is of high quality, trustworthy and easy to access. We promote the contribution that publishers make to innovation, openness and the sharing of knowledge and embrace change to support the growth and sustainability of the research ecosystem. As a common good, we provide data and analysis for all involved in the global activity of research.