Last week, I received the following email about an awesome new organization:

 

Dear Colleague,

All of us who publish in scientific journals know the frustrations of the peer review process: endlessly waiting for an uncertain outcome.

We have built a website aimed at changing this situation. At www.scirev.sc researchers can share their experience with the review process and select an efficient journal for submitting their work.

We already received more than 1000 review experiences, which are freely available on our website. They provide information on the duration and quality of the different phases of the review process and help you select an efficient journal to publish your work. An overview of all reviews is available at www.SciRev.sc/reviews

As a corresponding author of a scientific paper, your experience is of great value to other scholars in your field. We therefore invite you to visit our website and fill in the short questionnaire with questions about the duration and quality of the review process. You also can rate the overall quality of the experience and provide a motivation for your rating.

Any experience is important, even a direct rejection (we once waited three months to hear that the journal was not interested).

Looking forward to receiving your review(s).

 

Janine Huisman & Jeroen Smits

SciRev.sc

P.S. If you like our initiative, tell your colleagues about it. The larger the community of researchers who share their review experiences, the more useful SciRev becomes to all of us.

I think this is a great initiative to (a) give researchers a better idea of how long journals take and (b) put pressure on journals to be faster with their reviews by creating transparency. Consider joining and tracking your own review experience!