ALLEA Hosts Event on Making Peer Review More Visible
How can the invisible labour of peer review be meaningfully recognised and rewarded? This question was at the heart of the recent workshop, Turning Recommendations into Reality: Implementing Mechanisms for Recognising and Rewarding Peer Review, which brought together funders, research institutions, publishers, and researchers in Berlin to move from principles to practice.
On 15 January 2026, ALLEA, on behalf of the CoARA Working Group on Recognising and Rewarding Peer Review, organised a hybrid workshop in Berlin to build on its recommendations published in July 2025, which outlined practical ways to better acknowledge peer review as a core scholarly contribution. Participants discussed mechanisms ranging from recognising review activities in CVs and performance evaluations, to registering contributions in research information systems and platforms such as ORCID.
Discussions also highlighted broader challenges facing the peer review system. While openness and transparency are increasingly encouraged, participants emphasised the need for flexibility across disciplines. In some fields, open peer review may strengthen collaboration and recognition, participants cautioned that in others anonymity remains essential due to competitive pressures and power imbalances between junior and senior researchers. Another recurring theme was sustainability. With the volume of publications continuing to rise, many participants noted the growing imbalance between submissions and available reviewers. Proposals such as linking submissions to a proportional number of reviews were discussed as potential ways to re-balance the system and reinforce peer review as a shared academic responsibility.
The workshop concluded with hands-on design sprints, where participants developed pilot proposals to test new approaches to recognising peer review. These ideas, which focused on implementable and scaleable solutions, were designed to support organisations in embedding peer review recognition into research assessment practices and advancing CoARA’s broader goal of more responsible and holistic evaluation systems. Some points highlighted during the design sprint include:
- Exploring the feasibility of assigning formal credit to reviewers, such as issuing certificates, DOIs for review reports, or other verifiable recognition mechanisms. These credits could be publicly visible where appropriate and incorporated into academic evaluations, helping to incentivise high-quality reviewing while preserving flexibility for anonymous peer review where needed.
- Using existing infrastructures, such as ORCID profiles or institutional CRIS systems, to systematically record peer review activities. By registering reviews in a verifiable way, researchers could demonstrate their reviewing contributions across publishers and funders, enabling portable and standardised recognition across institutions.
- Institutions and funders could introduce dedicated sections in CVs, grant applications, and annual review processes where researchers report their peer review activities.
- Making peer review activities more open open and transparent could improve the qualities of reviews, and ultimately allow contribute to research excellence by not only increasing accountability, but by offering the possibility of reviewers collaborating with authors in the long-term.
If you would like to consider piloting the recommendations of the CoARA Working Group on Recognising and Rewarding Peer Review, register your interest here.
