Peer Review Week Spotlight

How did the idea for Global Campus come about, and what key challenges in education and research did it address? 

Paul: As entrepreneurs we have been active in the academic field for 12 years now and we usually worked with universities and researchers in the context of finding and writing grant proposals to secure research funding. In that context, we often used AI to match research ideas with summaries of funded projects and we used the same AI algorithms to match thematic funding opportunities with the publications of people to match those researchers to relevant thematic funds. However, the latter was only possible by using internal data of universities because publications are all behind paywalls. But then OpenAlex started in 2022, and this opened the opportunity for us to experiment with matching based on the information they provided – Title and Abstract of publications which we used as a definition of a researcher’s expertise.

This helped people in academia with a couple of challenges:

• Matching their researchers with thematic funding opportunities without having to think about identifying relevant keywords and without having to link us to their internal university systems
• Helping in identifying researchers that could be a good fit to open research vacancies 
• Identifying potential collaboration partners (external and internal)

Only by the end of 2022 we started to realize that Global Campus was also the perfect way of identifying reviewers. Since publishing was a new sector to us, it took us a few months to get to know people and to understand the sector. We are very happy that IntechOpen was the first in the publishing sector that trusted us as a platform to find relevant reviewers!

IntechOpen utilizes Global Campus to optimize reviewer selection. What key technological tools or innovations does Global Campus currently use to enhance the peer review process?

Paul: The first innovation I would like to mention is an underestimated one I guess, which is the work done by OpenAlex. The fact that they can provide such a high quality source of academic information open source is really impressive. This is proven by the increasing number of organizations that started supporting them in the last year, including the French government, the Dutch national funder and next to us dozens of other startups and SMEs. 

The other major part of the ‘magic’ in Global Campus is the semantic algorithms we are using. Currently, all other platforms where you can find peer reviewers work with algorithms that reduce the data (publications) to concepts in order to do the matching. We strongly believe that keeping the original text when matching leads to better results and this is also what we see in practice. The beauty of these semantic matching algorithms is that it has the same level of text understanding as the Generative AI tools have, but we don’t suffer from the downsides of those tools because we are not generating anything. We only compare texts (manuscripts with publications) to show the highest overlap in order to suggest reviewers.

Given the theme of Peer Review Week 2024 and the rapid advancement of AI-driven solutions, how do you see the future interaction between innovation, technology, and the peer review process? Specifically, what role do you foresee for artificial intelligence (AI) or automation in identifying reviewers and managing the peer review process?

Paul: The issue with talking about the future is that people can promise all sorts of things without taking responsibility. And many of the things that people dream of for the future of the peer review process are already possible today. So I’d like to focus on things that we can do today in order to improve our peer review processes right away. We strongly believe that humans should stay in control, but that doesn’t mean we can’t let AI suggest a lot of things to us that make our life easier. 

Just a few examples of things that can be done really easily and would improve the peer review process a lot.

When a manuscript is submitted, the only thing a human should have to check is whether the automated suggestions make sense because the:

• Manuscript was already automatically checked against potential reviewers that are suggested
• The reviewers that you invited a lot recently are either flagged or already filtered out of the results
• All Conflicts of interest (COI) with the authors of the manuscript are either flagged or the suggested reviewers with a COI are already filtered out of the results

Secondly, when inviting potential reviewers, the invitation should always include why we believe they would be a good fit. In the case of Global Campus we could show which publications of that researcher are close to the manuscript. 

And thirdly, alternative journals can be suggested to the editor and/or authors of the manuscript if it was rejected. For a publisher this can be valuable to suggest another title they own, but for authors it’s also very useful to see with which other journals their manuscript is in line.

As Global Campus, we started collaborating with Kriyadocs earlier this year to make these sorts of solutions available. As an end-to-end publishing system they have a lot of the information that is valuable to know for authors and potential reviewers. And the fun thing is, the abovementioned ideas are very easy to implement and will hugely increase the response rate of reviewers. In tests we did with Global Campus we see a 5 times decrease in reviewers that decline because they feel they don’t have the correct expertise. Close to zero people that highlight a COI out of hundreds of invitations.

So if there’s one thing I wish as an outcome for the Peer Review Week 2024 it is that after this week we all start talking less about what could be done, and just start doing it together!

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About Global Campus

Global Campus provides AI-powered solutions for universities, funders, and publishers to enhance academic and research activities. The platform offers tools to find academic experts, explore literature, and identify suitable journals for manuscript submissions. Global Campus envisions empowering academic and research communities by leveraging AI to enhance discovery, collaboration, and dissemination of knowledge.