Workshops

Rationale

The workshop sessions provide hands-on training in peer review under realistic conditions with the guidance of an experienced mentor. By working together to generate peer reviews as a group, the participants are able to learn from the mentor as well as the other participants in the group.

Format

The workshop block of Peerspectives consists of 4 sessions supervised by a mentor, with each session lasting up to three hours. Individual mentors have the freedom to decide the structure of the workshop that is most suitable to their group. However, we recommend providing a short training session[hyperlink] for mentors to attend prior to the first workshop date. This training summarizes the content that was covered in the lecture block, clarifies expectations of the students and the mentors, and provides suggestions for possible workshop structures.

A sample workshop format can be found here[hyperlink].

Timeline and expectations

The figure below outlines a potential timeline surrounding the workshops when partnering with a journal.

Due to the real-world nature of the workshops and the intention to review manuscripts currently under consideration at a journal partner, there can always be delays when requesting manuscripts and assigning them to the mentors. It is therefore important to plan ahead, communicate efficiently and transparently and maintain some flexibility.

Before the workshop

Sample workshop timeline. This is a sample workshop timeline for one workshop group.

The course administrator should contact the journal two weeks before the workshop date to remind the journal editor to assign a manuscript to the workshop mentor.

• Note: Since mentors likely receive parallel peer review requests unrelated to Peerspectives, it is good practice to make explicit which manuscript is intended to be used in the workshop. To prevent accidental acceptance of unrelated peer review requests we recommend that the journal partner communicates the assigned manuscripts, including the manuscript names or IDs, via email.

The journal editor will then send the manuscripts to the workshop mentor(s), who will forward them to the course administrator for distribution to participants. If a workshop mentor does not receive the assigned manuscript on time, the course administrator should follow up with the journal editor.

Once the course administrator receives the manuscripts from the workshop mentor(s), all manuscript materials – including supplementary content – should be uploaded to the sharing platform by the course administrator. Peerspectives coordination should then notify all participants that the content has been uploaded and to start the review draft.

In the week prior to the workshop date all group members are expected to read the manuscript, generate relevant comments, and develop a draft of the peer review. For each workshop, a different group member (the lead) will be in charge of keeping the group on track to ensure that a preliminary peer review report is ready for the workshop date.

• Note: The course administrator should monitor the sharing platform and monitor the draft document for activity in the week leading up to the review. If there is no activity three days before the workshop, then the group should be reminded. Although 1-2 participants are assigned as leaders for each workshop, everyone in the group should contribute to the review draft.

During the workshop

The workshops last between 1-3 hours depending on the amount of work the participants have invested before the workshop and the difficulty of the paper. As the sessions progress, workshop length typically decreases as groups find their rhythm and work more efficiently.

The course administrator should be available during the workshop to assist with any issues related to online meeting room access and to address questions that may arise at the start of the session.

After the workshop

If additional work is required to complete the review after the workshop, the group and workshop mentor should collaborate to develop a plan for finalizing the peer review report at the end of the workshop. The workshop mentor holds the final responsibility for finalizing the peer review report. The completed report will then be circulated to the group for approval before being sent to the journal.

If the workshop mentor is unable to submit the review within 4 days after the workshop (or by the deadline given by the journal editor), they must communicate this to the journal editor and the course administrator.

The submitted review should clearly acknowledge all contributors to the review report (i.e., all participants and the mentor). The contributions of the course’s mentees improve science, should be acknowledged, and deserve credit.

Confidentiality and data protection

Depending on the confidentiality of the document (i.e., unpublished manuscript, pre-print, published material, etc.) and the agreement with your journal partner, you may want to consider using a secure platform to facilitate this. Please refer to Required Materials for potential platform suggestions, as well as considerations to make when selecting a platform to distribute manuscripts.

Tips

Facilitating the online meeting

• When scheduling workshops, it is helpful to be flexible to accommodate the schedules of workshop mentors. However, encouraging groups to meet on a consistent day and time helps streamline scheduling. When multiple groups meet at different times, coordination can quickly become challenging.
• If all the groups are meeting at the same date/times, create one, recurring meeting, and use that for the entire semester. Within that meeting create breakout rooms for each group.
• If using an online meeting platform such as Zoom, make sure that screen-sharing is allowed for all before the start of the meeting.

Workshop Groups

• If there are more than ~6 course participants and multiple workshop groups will be formed, we recommend grouping participants by complementary expertise rather than grouping similar expertise.
• Either during the application process or early in the course, asking participants to identify their top five academic strengths or research focuses can help in planning group assignments.
• After the first and second workshops, check in with the mentors to gauge how the groups are interacting and to ensure that all participants are contributing to the group.