Discover. Drive. Deliver.

The textbook definition of “ethics” is: the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group, culture, etc. Ethics as they govern publishing have taken on a larger and broader scope throughout the course of my 28-year career, extending beyond the more traditional forms of ethics policies. Ethics historically focused on figure manipulation and plagiarism – but now we have moved into an era of paper mills and AI-generated reviews and manuscripts. How you handle ethics in your editorial office is extremely important to all stakeholders involved in the peer review process; therefore, having a firm grasp on exactly what your policies are and how you enforce them is paramount.

In this second of three posts on the theme of reviewer training as a form of engagement to both increase reviewer invitation acceptance rates and elevate review standards, we look at a variety of training programs that have already been implemented. This endeavor was not a methodologically driven academic exercise. Instead, the purpose of this post is simply to collate some potentially inspiring programs that journals and societies may consider emulating. The final post in this series will reflect upon the issues associated with implementing a peer reviewer-training program.

In the summer of 2020, when I was still the vice president of publishing for the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), our editorial staff and editors were moved to reflect, as many in our industry were, on how we might rise to the call of ensuring our family of journals was diverse, equitable, and inclusive. On the face of it, we could see that our boards of editors were lacking diversity—but that observation was without data (we didn’t collect demographic information about our editors). Furthermore, we didn’t systematically collect such data on our authors or reviewers, and so while we had a sense that stark disparities and inequities likely existed within our portfolio, we lacked the necessary information to support that thought. It was then that we realized initiating change would be a complex and multi-layered effort. And for me personally, I took a step back and began to educate myself on the scale of these issues and their impact on the entire research ecosystem.