The Challenges of Finding Peer Reviewers: Insights from our Product Design Research

Abstract

Finding good peer reviewers is a difficult task. In Decentralized Science project we are designing and developing a tool to improve the quality, fairness and reliability of academic peer reviewing. Our approach relies in opening peer review, giving transparency to the peer reviewing process using decentralized technologies such as Blockchain. During our ongoing product design research we gained interesting insights about the peer reviewing selection process, and how editors currently deal with it. Our research methods are oriented towards the development of a software tool. We use Lean Design and Agile development principles, favoring fast iterative learning over the precision and completeness of more formal approaches. This contribution shares what we learned in the process about how editors deal with peer reviewer selection: from their needs and complains to their tricks, including some of their confessions. It also explains how we embraced this insights to improve our current prototype design.