Establishing contact with a journal partner

About journal partners

Partnering with an academic journal allows participants to engage in the peer review process in real time. Journal partners provide live manuscripts currently under review for use in the Peerspectives course. By the end of each workshop, each group will have collaboratively developed a peer review report, which is submitted by the workshop mentor. These peer review reports are considered part of the journal’s editorial process – just like any other peer review.

The course’s learning objectives can be met without a journal partner. However, participants will miss out on the opportunity to engage in real-time peer review. Partnering with a journal also allows participants to see how their reviews are applied in practice, which many find especially rewarding. For suggestions on how to adapt the course without a journal partner, please visit this page[hyperlink].

Identifying journal partners

The following outlines strategies for identifying a journal partner:

• Identify journals with which the course lecturers or administrators have had editorial roles
• Look for journals that align with the participants' research domains or areas of interest.
• Reach out to journals that have expressed interest in improving research methods, transparency, or peer review quality.

Contacting potential journal partners

If you have identified a potential journal partner with which you have no connection to, you should send them an email outlining the aims and content of the Peerspectives course, incentives for the journal to participate, and what would be needed from the journal.

Related email templates[edit | edit source]

• Email: First contact with a journal partner

First contact with a journal partner

Dear [Name of Editor in Chief], Thank you for your interesting talk on refereed preprints during the Berlin Open Access series last week! I am reaching out to you from [Your Institution] in [Your City and Country] based on a recommendation from [Name, if applicable]. At our institution, we are introducing an initiative to improve peer review in the biomedical sciences [or replace with your field] called “Peerspectives” – a peer review training program for early career researchers. By partnering with journals, Peerspectives is able to provide this training to participants with scientific manuscripts undergoing active peer review. In turn, journal partners receive high-quality group peer review reports of these papers (under the supervision of an experienced mentor). We believe that [Journal Name] is an ideal journal for our institution to partner with to host this peer review training program. [Insert paragraph on why you believe that this journal is ideal for your circumstance. Peerspectives was originally developed in partnership with the BMJ, and the feedback from the BMJ editors about the quality of the Peerspectives reviews has been overwhelmingly positive. We believe [Journal Name]  could also benefit from our pool of trained early-career researchers for future review assignments. Below, you will find a summary of the key aspects of our training program, specifically highlighting what we would request from you as a journal partner. If you are interested in working with us on this initiative, we would be more than happy to adapt our lectures and workshops to [Journal Name]'s process of public review of preprints. We would be happy to elaborate on these points and tell you more about this initiative and its goals in a short video call at your convenience. Alternatively, we are happy to answer any questions you may have via email. Many thanks in advance for your consideration. Best wishes, [Your Name] About the program: Aim: To address the absence of topics such as the scientific publishing landscape, peer review, and scientific journal editorial processes in the curricula of most graduate academic programs Course structure: A hybrid of interactive lectures and a series of hands-on workshops led by a team of methods-focused early-career researchers [revise if necessary] engaged in optimizing peer review and experienced scientists with extensive reviewing and editing experience. The lectures critically discuss the current publishing system, introduce open science and open data, discuss ethics, inclusion and diversity in the context of review, and equip participants with the knowledge required to generate high-quality peer review reports of their own. In the workshops, students work together in small groups of 5-6 [revise if necessary] to review live manuscripts from a partnering journal under the guidance of an experienced mentor with journal editing experience. Participants are therefore introduced to collaborating journals as potential future peer-reviewers. Participant feedback: Peerspectives has been highly rated by students for its practical relevance and approach, and has incorporated feedback from previous students, editor-mentors, and journal partners to improve the course. Incentives: In order to engage students in a meaningful way, our training program is designed to familiarize them with real-world reviewing conditions and makes their work count by giving them credit for their contributions, both in terms of course credits and public recognition of their reviewing work through open review. Students can also be added to [Journal Name]’s reviewer database with a note that they have received Peerspectives training. Target group: Our course is free of charge, and our current target audience includes motivated graduate/PhD students and early post docs in the biomedical sciences from around the globe with at least basic training in health research methods [adapt if necessary]. For more details, please see the Peerspectives Wiki, OSF page, or manuscript preprint. What we would need from your side: We would request to be involved in the consultative review of preprints, with a broad scope in the domains of epidemiology, public health, and medicine starting in [Month Year]. As part of this collaboration, we would like to invite one of your existing editors to serve as an editor-mentor in our course. They would receive a short training by our team, and we would coach them through their first workshop session (running 4 workshops with 4 review assignments per semester). Thank you for your consideration! We look forward to a potential future partnership and are happy to provide further details in an online meeting.