Being a Good Peer Reviewer

Every year, the Society for Scholarly Publishing celebrates Peer Review Week, sometime in September.

 They often has several posts about peer reviewing at their blog, The Scholarly Kitchen. One of the posts that week was “How to Be a Good Peer Reviewer” by Jasmine Wallace, the Peer Review Manager at the American Society for Microbiology. Please read it.

Some highlights from the advice that she gives:

• Mind the time: please do not keep your research peers waiting. Pay attention to the deadline for submitting your report and make time to get it done by that date. If you foresee a delay, then either don’t accept the invitation to request or ask for an extension.
• Be intentional: strive to add value to what is presented in the manuscript, rather than simply criticizing it. Go into it with the idea of making the research community stronger by helping the authors publish a good study.
• Read the guidelines and scope: you should not treat all reviewing assignments the same. Not only is each journal different, but different paper types have different criteria for acceptance. For JGR Space Physics, our reviewing guidelines are here with more information here, plus a description of paper types is here.
• Educate and grow your community: peer reviewing for a journal is a service to your research community, so go into this with the mindset that it is not just about you, the authors, and the editor, but rather you are improving the quality of research in your community.
• Say No: is it fine to say no to a reviewing request. Well, not all the time, but if you are not willing and able to get the review done on time, then it is better to say no and suggest colleagues who might have interest and availability.
• Be Bold and Constructive: be bold in that you should not be intimidated to offer criticism of a senior colleague’s work, yet be constructive in that you should be specific and detailed in how to improve the work to make it publishable.
• Get Credit: if you haven’t already, please sign up for ORCID so that there is a public record of your reviewing service to the community.

For the most part, reviewers for JGR Space Physics adhere to these good-reviewer guidelines. I am fortunate to get to work with so many thoughtful, thorough, and considerate researchers. Thank you for being such a great community.

 

Data Policy Update

Because we all love talking about AGU’s data policy, you should know that when you go to the JGR Space Physics GEMS manuscript submission site, in fact the GEMS site for any AGU journal, you will see this notice above the login fields:

I don’t actually know how long it has been there. I go to this login page a lot but often fail to spend any time on it, quickly zipping to the login fields and moving on to my editorial tasks. I posted last summer about this change that “data available from authors” is not allowed, with a list of available generic data repositories that will mint a digital object identifier for your data files. I keep getting comments and some pushback from the community about this, and now I just noticed and carefully read this “Important” statement on the GEMS login page! So it is a convenient time to have a blog post about it.

This has been slowly changing throughout my time as EiC. When I had just started, AGU was in the process of fully implementing its stated data policy. I then had a couple of other posts in 2014 about how the editorial board for JGR Space Physics this policy, and then another in 2015 on supporting information. That one actually stated that it was okay to have the digital values stored as supporting information along with the paper but this is no longer allowed. Well, please upload it as supporting information for review purposes, with a note to the editor that this is what you are doing, but upon acceptance, upload those files to a DOI-minting data repository for permanent archiving.

Authors: please plan accordingly with your digital data, both observational and numerical. AGU wants all of the numbers behind the figures available to reviewers and readers. Please include data sets as supporting info during submission but have a statement about the repository to which it will be uploaded in the Acknowledgments section, and include all weblinks to existing data repositories.

Reviewers: please check data availability for the manuscripts that you review. This should now be part of your checklist. AGU HQ staff and the editor should also be checking this, but you are critical to this process too.

Note that this supersedes the posted Data Policy at the AGU Author Resources pages, which still describe the policy enacted in 2014. I hope that this webpage is updated soon.

More about FAIR data policies can be found at the COPDESS website.

 

2018 Outstanding Reviewer Citations

The Eos article is out listing the 2018 outstanding reviewers, as cited by the editors of AGU’s 20 journals. I force the Editors of JGR Space Physics to make these selections as a group decision, so you will not see our individual names as the “citing editor” but rather the generic “Cited by JGR: Space Physics editors” wording. Other journals do it differently but I do this intentionally to provide one more layer of anonymity to these reviewers. Authors whose manuscript was assigned to a specific editor cannot try to guess if this person was one of their reviewers.

You can peruse the full list for all journals within the Eos article, but here are the honorees for 2018 from JGR Space Physics:

• Nicholas Achilleos, University College London
• Ingrid Cnossen, British Antarctic Survey
• Michael Hartinger, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
• Marina Kubyshkina, Saint Petersburg State University
• Astrid Maute, High Altitude Observatory, National Center for Atmospheric Research
• Takuma Nakamura, Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences
• Frantisek Nemec, Charles University
• Jack Scudder, University of Iowa
• Viktor Sergeev, Saint Petersburg State University
• Vytenis Vasyliunas, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research
• Rongsheng Wang, University of Science and Technology of China

In addition to saying thank you to these very special 11 referees, we also say thank you to all of the 1358 people that served as manuscript peer reviewers in 2018 for the journal. Collectively, you submitted over 3000 reports. This journal could not exist without you. Thank you very much!

Outstanding Reviewers for 2017

Every year, AGU asks the editors of each journal to come up with a list of recipients for the reviewing excellence award. We had 1124 manuscripts submitted to JGR Space Physics in 2017, so the editors could choose up to 11 people to receive this award. This is a nearly impossible task, as we had 1,448 different people serve as reviewers for the journal in 2017. To further complicate it, 11 does not divide 5 ways, so it is not an even split among the editors.

            So, first let me say thank you to all of the 1,448 scientists that provided one or more reviews for JGR Space Physics last year. Every single one of you is vitally important to making this journal what it is. Your name is in print in our thank you editorial, which appeared in the June 2018 issue. The journal could not exist without the collective input of so many members of the research community.

There was an Eos article, also in June, listing the 2017 reviewing excellence award winners. I sometimes remember to write a blog post about these awardees, but I also forget to do this on other years. We select these awardees in March, the decision is a groupwide vote after we all suggest 2 to 5 names, but I have to wait until after the Eos article comes out before I announce anything here. This year, I remembered! So, here it is.

            The 2017 awardees for JGR Space Physics are as follows:

• Maciej Bzowski, Space Research Center, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Pascal Demoulin, Observatoire de Paris
• Robyn Fiori, Geomagnetic Laboratory, Natural Resources Canada
• Michael Gedalin, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
• James Hecht, The Aerospace Corporation
• Erin Lay, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Noé Lugaz, University of New Hampshire
• Robert Marshall, University of Colorado Boulder
• Evgeny Panov, Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences
• Jack Scudder, University of Iowa
• Paul Withers, Boston University

Unconscious Bias in Space Physics

I attended the Triennial Earth-Sun Summit meeting a couple of weeks ago, and there was a very good plenary session on unconscious bias in space physics. The presenters were the authors of the Clancy et al. paper in JGR Planets on bias in astronomy and planetary science. They summarized the findings of that paper, which quantified the extent of women and minorities reporting feeling unsafe or encountering a hostile work environment in these science fields. The numbers are not encouraging, with 80% of women experiencing some kind of sexist remark and two-thirds of women-of-color hearing racist remarks in the workplace. Furthermore, over a quarter of women have felt unsafe in their current position because of their gender or race. This is disturbing to me that the numbers are so large in 2018.

            Fortunately, the conversation is not ending with the TESS plenary session. The organizers created a handout that was available to everyone at the session and online with the session description. I highly encourage everyone to read this tri-fold pamphlet. They encourage people to take the Harvard implicit bias test and read through the materials at the U of Arizona’s StepUp! by-stander intervention program. The sheet is filled with tips on how to identify and minimize implicit bias. Two of the biggest things that individuals can do immediately: amplify minority voices is group discussions (but don’t he-peat) and avoid making sexual remarks in the work environment.

As for JGR Space Physics, fighting implicit bias can be done in several ways. The first is to be cordial in your correspondence, especially to early career researchers like graduate students, and to apply the Platinum Rule in your interactions with others, thinking about how they want to be treated and considering the interaction from their perspective. Authors, please use gender-neutral pronouns in responses to anonymous reviewers. Reviewers, consider using one of the links in the handout for quantifying gender bias in writing. Finally, I hope that you all make a personal DEI pledge to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. People leave the field because of sexism in the workplace, and for our discipline, the workplace includes manuscript correspondence. I occasionally hear from advisors whose students have had a bad interaction with a reviewer.

Thanks to the TESS meeting and session organizers and for coordinating this panel discussion. Let’s continue to strive to do better to reduce implicit bias in space physics.