All entries for July 2018

How do I become an Exchanges Reviewer?

The question of how one becomes a reviewer with Exchanges is one I'm asked from time to time, and I will confess how this is achieved isn’t automatically obvious from the journal’s home pages. Anyone with a research background from a PhD student through to established professor from any academic or research institution from around the globe is warmly welcomed to consider joining our growing peer reviewer community. It couldn’t be simpler to join, as there are there are three easy ways potential new reviewers can register with us.

The easiest approach is to register yourself with the journal as a reviewer via the online form: https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/user/register. You’ll want to ideally use your academic institutional email here, as the Editors will validate potential reviewers before we use them, and checking email addresses is one of the most common starting points for this process.

As you create your account with Exchanges, you’ll have the opportunity to add in a range of research interests to your profile. These should ideally be both disciplinary broadly and specific, because when my Editorial Board are looking for reviewers, the first place we turn is to search on these terms. We don’t use a controlled vocabulary, so you are free to describe your research interests in any way you like. However, remember to add terms you know others are more likely to search on, alongside the more specific ones, as the Editorial team won’t necessarily be conversant with the more niche disciplinary terminology.

Secondly, if you’ve already got an account with Exchanges but didn’t register as a reviewer when you initially registered, it is possible to sign up as one by logging into your user profile (https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/user/profile), clicking into the Roles tab and then checking the box for Reviewer. You’ll need to add in your reviewing interests as well at this point in the box provided (Reviewing Interests), otherwise we’ll never find you to ask. You can repeat this process as often as you like to add, or subtract, reviewing interests from your profile.

Thirdly, and most informally, you can contact myself or any of my Editors and ask to become a reviewer. It might be you’d like to know more about the process, and the potential workload, before signing up, and that’s just fine too. Myself, and my team, can happily create you an account, which you can later amend via the profile page as discussed above. The reverse is also true, as we do seek our reviewers in the wider academic world, via our professional networks, where we don’t have sufficient good matches within our own reviewers’ database for articles on various disparate topics.

There is actually a fourth way you can become a reviewer, and that is to publish with Exchanges. In common with standard academic journal practice, all prior authors with the title are considered as potential future reviewers. Hence, if you take the wise move of choosing to publish an article with Exchanges, don’t be too surprised if we come knocking on your door some time later to help us maintain the quality standards of future academic publications. Believe me when I say, your fellow authors will be especially grateful for the insight you’ll bring.

For more formal details about how we conduct and manage quality assurance, see Exchanges’ guidance for peer reviewers.

Oh, and finally, if you ever want to stop being a potential reviewer for us, while we’ll be sorry to see you go, you can either uncheck the box on your Role Profile page. Or alternately, if you want us to remove your information from the database altogether, then email myself or any of the Editorial Board, and we’ll delete your account.

Gareth Johnson : 17 Jul 2018 15:34 |  Tags: Assurance Contribution Intellectual Labour Peer Quality Review |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Workshopping Exchanges

In recent days I’ve been asked to run two different workshops this coming autumn. Firstly, I’ll be likely contributing to a summer school on peer review and effective academic writing. This is quite exciting as it’s a development of the brief session I ran a month or so back for STEM post-graduate researchers at Warwick. Naturally, I haven’t even begun to start pulling the material together for this, but it will make for a great opportunity to firstly promote the journal to some future potential authors and reviewers. Secondly, it will once again provide me with a strong motivation to go back over my own peer-reviewing knowledge and the journal’s protocols with a fine-toothed comb. Benefits all round there.

The other workshop is a new development in the Institute’s Accolade programme for our research fellows. The brief is to run a workshop for a couple of hours around Exchanges and scholarly publishing. Obviously as Senior Editor (and a researcher into publishing practices) I could easily fall into a long discourse about publishing developments, but I think it would be more beneficial for the participants if I mostly hold off on that and develop some more kinaesthetic learning experiences. I’ve sketched out a session thumbnail for now, but I’ll come back to this in a few months as the ideas start to crystallise in my head a bit more.

Whatever happens, it is great to be contributing to training and teaching once more, whilst also spreading the good word about Exchanges.

Gareth Johnson : 02 Jul 2018 15:48 |  Tags: Peer Publishing Review Training Workshops |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem