News

In response to the current pandemic and in order to increase the efficiency of peer review and publication process of crucial COVID-19 research, Hindawi, the Royal Society, PLOS and PeerJ came together to create a reviewer pool and implement portable review.

This collaboration quickly evolved into the C19 Rapid Review Initiative - a large-scale collaboration among publishers and organisations across the scholarly publishing industry. The initiative calls for volunteer reviewers to commit to rapid reviewing times and to pre-agree that their reviews and identity can be shared among publishers and journals, if submissions get rerouted to different publication venues.

The initiative has received a positive response with nearly 2k reviewers signing up as rapid reviewers from more than 80 countries. In addition, the C19 Rapid Review is now endorsed by SSRN, AfricArxiv and Research on Research Institute (RoRI). RoRI will be driving forward the initiative's reporting and analytics working group and using the C19RR group as a case study for their wider research on research projects.

Recently, UCL Press, Springer Nature, MIT Press, and Cambridge University Press joined the collaboration with a number of their titles, increasing the original group of nine publishers and organisations to 20 and establishing the C19 Rapid Review Initiative as one of the largest cross-publisher collaborations within the scholarly publishing industry.

Chief Publishing Officer at Hindawi Sarah Greaves has been leading the initiative alongside Phil Hurst of the Royal Society, Joerg Heber of PLOS, and Peter Binfield of Peer J. RoRI's contribution to the initiative is coordinated by Stephen Pinfield at University of Sheffield and Ludo Waltman at Leiden University.

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