Peer Review Unpacked: Dr. Gareth Dyke on the Good, the Bad & the Fixable

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About The Publisherspeak Podcast‍

Real stories. Honest reflections. Conversations about leadership, change, and the work that shapes our world.

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Hosted by Sowmya Mahadevan, Chief Orchestrator at Kriyadocs, The Publisherspeak Podcast features interviews with people making meaningful moves—inside and outside the world of scholarly publishing. From academic leaders and publishing professionals to coaches and change-makers, each episode goes beyond job titles to explore personal journeys and the mindsets behind impactful work.

In this episode

Host Sowmya sits down with Dr. Gareth Dyke, Academic Director of Reviewer Credits and Sales & Business Development Director of 4Evolution to explore the critical state of peer review today.

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Drawing on his experience from both sides of the table—as a prolific author and long-time editor—Gareth shares what’s broken in the current peer review system, where misunderstandings persist, and why this moment presents a unique opportunity for change. From transparency gaps to tech-enabled solutions, we dive into how publishing can evolve to better support trust, quality, and collaboration. Whether you're an author, editor, publisher, or just someone invested in the future of scholarly communication—this one’s for you.

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Dive into the full conversation below or watch the episode here.

Full conversation

Sowmya: Welcome to The Publisherspeak Podcast. Gareth, it's wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me on The Publisherspeak Podcast here today.

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Gareth: And thank you for the chance to do it. It's great to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Thanks again.

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Sowmya: I was looking at your LinkedIn profile. I was just looking through, what you have done, I thought you're like this Indiana Jones meets Editor-in-Chief. Of course, you know, he was an archaeologist, you're a paleontologist. But from paleontology to Editor-in-Chief, tell us what happened here. I mean, how did you enter into this lovely world of publishing all the way from paleontology?

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Gareth: 20 years or so I worked as a paleontologist, so I did my PhD in Bristol and then I worked in New York at the American Museum of Natural History and then got a series of academic positions. And my research is on the relationship between birds and dinosaurs and how birds first evolved, first developed their flight characteristics, flight surfaces, like within dinosaurs. So, yeah, and during that time, like quite early on in my research career, when I worked in Ireland, I was offered the opportunity by the guys at Taylor and Francis, shout out to Taylor and Francis, to become the Editor- in-Chief of a journal that's called Historical Biology and I did that for 19 years.

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In the end, I just stepped down just last year at the end of 2024. So, yeah, I was doing that and working as a paleontologist. And then due to some family changes from family situations, like, we moved back to Hungary, where we live now, and I started working in editing first of all, and then moved gradually into various roles within publishing, like starting with author services, researcher services, companies like Charlesworth, Enago, Edanz, TopEdit, which is a Chinese company, and then got a job with Springer Nature, and then, now I'm working with reviewer credits and with a company called 4Evolution, so publishing services. But that's how it happened. I mean, through working on journals, through my research, basically.

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Sowmya: So, from digging for bones to digging for good manuscripts, I suppose good research is kind of like what I can sum up your entire career as, perhaps. Right?

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Gareth: Yeah, I mean, I published quite a lot of papers myself and worked as a peer reviewer, of course, as all academics tend to do. And that's another issue that we'll probably come back to in a moment. But yeah, I got a lot of experience, like from the researcher side of things, like understanding how the publishing process works from a researcher's perspective, and then also from a publishing perspective, editorial perspective, working with Historical Biology and other journals.

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So, that enables me to have this kind of view of the industry from both a professional publishing perspective and also from a researcher perspective and that I try to keep that in mind with a lot of the things that I do today, especially the content that we make and promoting journals to researchers, having researchers in mind all the time.

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Sowmya: Gareth, you said that your journey, your jump into publishing started with this journal called Historical Biology. That sounds interesting. I mean the title of that sounds super interesting. And just talk a little bit about, okay, did you start this journal from scratch?

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And so that's how you moved from, say, being a researcher into the world of publishing. So, what is your attachment to this Historical Biology journal and your experience being on the publishing side?

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Gareth: Yeah, so Historical Biology is a very general paleobiology journal that was owned by a company called Gordon and Breach back in the day. And that company was bought by Taylor and Francis 20 years ago or more. I forget the dates exactly. But I had known the editor of that journal and several other members of the original editorial board. So, when TNF took over the journal and the editor had stepped down, they changed the editorial board. The journal had not been publishing any papers actually for a number of years. And so, through connections that I had with some older colleagues in paleontology, I got connected with the journal. And then over the next 18, 19 years, slowly we were able to rebuild the editorial board.

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And gradually, I mean, the journal never developed like a fantastic impact factor. It became actually kind of a mega journal for lots of different papers from different researchers on different topics, but publishing quite a lot of content like over the years. So, yeah, I mean, through connections, but I remember my boss at the time at University College Dublin, when I told him I was going to do this, he told me it's a really bad idea. Like, don't do it. Like, it'll just suck up lots of time.

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You don't get any credit for it. Right? At universities, I mean, there's no way of reporting this kind of work. Peer review as well. But editorial work for journals is just not something that universities care about. So, my boss, Tom, he was like, don't do it. It'll take up loads of time. It's a waste of time. You should be getting grants, you should be working on research papers. So, I ignored him, which was probably a good thing for my future career in publishing.

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Sowmya: So, let's dive into that. I think you're touching upon this, right? So, the peer review aspect within the research, community research process. I know you are very passionate about, you're very vocal about the peer review process. But what do you see as the biggest challenge today with respect to peer review and also the biggest opportunity that you're looking forward to here?

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Gareth: Wow. I mean, that's a great question. Because from a researcher's perspective, the biggest problem with peer review is that you don't get any recognition for it either from the publishers, but much more importantly from your institution, from your university. So, like when I worked in Ireland and in the UK, we get assessed every year based on our publication output and of course that's predominantly based upon the quality, the perceived quality of the journals that you publish in. So, their impact factor and whatnot and the grant money that you generate.

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So, those were the two main things that, that we got assessed on and those were influencing our chances of promotion, extra salary, like support from the department. There was never ever any suggestion that how many papers are you peer reviewing was taken into account. So, that is a big challenge for researchers. Like, we like feel like this community need to get involved in peer review. There's going to be a certain number of papers every year in your field that you would want to work on, that you'd want to like peer review, but you never get any recognition for it and of course, in this day of open access and pre printing and all that kind of stuff, like the advantages that you might have had in the past, like getting access to early stage research, knowing about trends in your field quicker than others are just, they just don't exist for researchers anymore. From the publisher perspective, of course, just quickly, the biggest challenge is finding good reviewers, willing reviewers, who will do the work for free, of course, in a relatively short period of time. So I mean, we're really coming towards a, well, I mean, I would argue that we've already passed a crisis point in publishing when it comes to peer review because of these two competing factors and it's the goodwill of researchers that holds the whole system together. Nothing else, I would say.

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Sowmya: And is that sort of like a segue for you? Was that a motivation to join Reviewer Credits? I know you're currently serving as the academic director and so for our audience, tell us a little bit about what is Reviewer Credits or what is the mission behind it and how does that gel with, your own thought processes around peer review?

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Gareth: Well, Reviewer Credits has been around for a number of years and this is its second kind of incarnation as a company, as a business. It was started originally by a group of Italian doctors, emergency doctors.

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And when we saw this coming online like five, six years ago, we, all of us, or many of us thought immediately that this was a really good idea because it's a platform at its heart that provides a way for researchers to get recognition, to get rewarded, to get credits for the reviews that they perform for publishers. So, in its original form and still today, if you sign up as a reviewer and you do a review for a participating journal, you get credits within the system for that work, which you can then spend on things in the reward center, like services that you might need, like editing, translation, figure creation, and so on. So, when it started, many of us thought this is a fantastic idea from a researcher perspective. And, yeah, we're building it up still, like, you know, pushing it to publishers, trying to convince publishers that they should provide some more tangible rewards to researchers other than just certificates or discounts on their own services. And I think that this is one of the big issues, one of the big disconnects between publishers and researchers.

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I mean, publishers often think that their peer review pool is their pool, like they shouldn't share it with other publishers. But, you know, all of the researchers in a field like organic chemistry, for example, they're working for lots of different journals, lots of different publishers, and researchers often have no idea who the publisher is of the journal that they are publishing in or peer reviewing for. It's a big, a big disconnect. So, we really need to encourage publishers to do more for researchers and share their information about peer reviewers. And I really don't see that happening other than through platforms like Reviewer Credits. So, that's the basis for what we try to do.

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Sowmya: Is there a wish that you have here that says, okay, hey, or what is the trajectory that you see this going in? Because the way you're talking about, yes, you know, like, on one hand submissions are going up. It's very hard to find peer reviewers. And the whole thing that is holding the publishing together is this, is peer review. It's the fact that it's curated content that is getting published and that's getting put out into the world. So, where do you see all of this evolving? And you mentioned that we have passed that crisis point. What are you projecting? How do you see this playing out in the future?

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Gareth: Well, yeah. It's hard to say, but I don't want this to turn into an advert for Reviewer Credits because, you know, but it is a great idea and so When I saw that the platform had moved into new ownership, I immediately kind of tried to get involved again because I do believe that this is a fantastic platform that helps researchers. So, where do I see this going? I mean, unless publishers are able to nurture and really develop their pools of peer reviewers on the one hand, so that means providing rewards, recognition that reviewers actually want. And we know from our survey work that giving them discounts on your APCs or giving them discounts on your services is not so attractive to researchers because they don't want to be restricted to just publishing their next paper in X Publishers Journal.

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So, that's why we need cross publisher collaboration on review pools. And I often point to portable peer review platforms like the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium, where a single subject area is sharing peer review amongst different publishers. And that would be something that totally could be replicated if publishers wanted to collaborate. And they need to realize that, you know, 90% of the database for their organic chemistry peer reviewer pool is going to be shared with every other publisher that also has those kinds of journals. From a researcher perspective though, unless the way that universities and governments change the way that they evaluate researchers to include, you know, things like peer review, I mean, I really don't see that the situation can change a whole great deal.

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But you know, the bigger publishers that have influence on governments could do a lot more to move that forward as well. So, that if I'm working at the University of Southampton or wherever and I'm spending a proportion of my time reviewing papers, I also get some recognition for that, like in my assessments as a researcher. So, it's a really difficult question to answer, but we hope.

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Sowmya: Yeah, no, totally. I think it's because I also think I've heard about some ideological differences of opinion in terms of should peer reviewers actually be compensated. Right? Or credited or whatever it is that you want to call it is, or because they're doing it, you know, will that in any way dilute the whole peer review process? So I think it's a much, much bigger conversation. Probably we need to do a whole podcast around, around peer reviewers, finding peer review, crediting them, etc. But going on the same line. I think this is one of the themes that emerged when we, I mean, you were there at the Publisherspeak earlier this year and one of the themes or one of the questions that came about over there is that do authors even are aware or researchers aware of what, how publishers contribute to the publishing process, what exactly do they do? Because there was this feeling that I'm submitting my paper to you. I'm almost already done. You're asking money from me?

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What exactly is the value. And I think one of the themes that emerged as well is that publishers don't really do a great job of articulating that value to the authors. What is your take on it? Do you see that as being an issue? I know you were very vocal during our conversations at the Publisherspeak, but what are your thoughts around that?

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Gareth: Yeah, I think it's a huge problem because the researchers that we talk to both from within the publishing industry now, and I've done quite a lot of work with different publishers, like over the last few years as well as, as a researcher, it is definitely true that researchers have their favorite journals. They know which journals they should be publishing in or they'd like to be publishing in within their own research field, but they very often do not know who the publisher of those journals is. And we see this often. I have some real examples of this working for different publishers where you go and you promote a publisher in an event, in a webinar, and then you talk about a journal and researchers will say, oh, I didn't realize that that journal belonged to that publisher. So, as an industry, we're very, very good at internally promoting ourselves, I would say, and talking amongst ourselves about how great we are and what we do.

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I kind of imagining like a circular kind of firing squad, you know, with this kind of analogy that, you know, as an industry we definitely talk a lot and we promote ourselves within the publishing industry. But we are very bad at disseminating information like out outside the publishing industry. A great example of this is peer review week that's coming up next month in September. I should say if you ask your average researcher, like, go to your local university and ask, have you ever heard of peer review week? I bet you that very few researchers have heard of this, even though it's supposed to be something that connects publishers with researchers.

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That’s just as an example of what I'm talking about. So, when we come to the question of should I be paying to get my research published? Researchers don't understand what publishers do. I think it's a huge issue and we of course can explain it. Oh, we've got staff salaries and quality control checks and all these verticals that we have to pay for.

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But as a researcher, I don't get it. Like, why should I have to pay $11,000 to convert my already accepted paper to open access. That's a funding agency requirement. So, I've got to pay it out of my grant or my university has to pay it, but very much seen as a waste of money by researchers, I would argue.

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Sowmya: Now, do you see any of the publishers doing a good job of translating this value or communicating this value? Have there been instances where you feel like something like this is headed in the right direction or you feel like we are still living in a bubble and not necessarily communicating to the audience, at the end of the day, the researcher is the customer, so to speak, for the publishing industry. Right? So if they don't feel the value, that is a huge problem, isn't it?

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Gareth: It is. And yeah, I think, or I know that most outgoing marketing from publishers is focused on content acquisition, it's focused on submission acquisition, not so much focused on keeping researchers happy, on community building, on providing resources or feedback or other ways to keep like a research community engaged with a publisher.

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And of course that's because the main focus is on the business and the business relies upon submission. So, I would answer in that way. I mean, it's not something that marketing teams that publishers do, the bigger publishers have community engagement teams that do this kind of thing, but I think there's a huge opportunity for publishers there and education. Generally, I'm very passionate about researcher education and at least for the publishers that I've had the good fortune to work with, I've tried always to push researcher education as a component of things like read and publish licenses, things like, you know, community engagement and outreach.

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And it shouldn't be something that researchers have to pay for. I firmly believe, you know, so that would be my kind of response to that, like lots to do. And I think publishers have to diversify their, their marketing, their outreach into areas where the benefit might not be immediately apparent. So, away from just trying to get quality submissions as quickly as possible into the journals to develop other. And it'll pay off. It will pay off in the future, but it needs to be invested in order for that to happen.

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Sowmya: So, let's talk about your other passion. Right. Which is also used, like you said, around the researcher training. And so you do a lot of training. So, tell us a little bit about it. And I think it's also for different cultural contexts. Right? So I know you, you're involved with China, you're involved with several different cultural researches and other cultural contexts. So, tell us a little bit about what you do from a training perspective and perhaps how it has changed your perspective or opened your eyes to a more of a global researcher community.

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Gareth: Yeah, so this is how I got into publishing in the first place because in my research career, which kind of still goes on like to a certain extent, but like I interacted with colleagues from all over the world, of course, and used to spend quite a lot of time helping colleagues from all over the world, China, Russia, etc. Like with their English and helping them to get better at writing, communicating, giving presentations, making posters and so on. So, when I started working with Charlesworth, like Charlesworth were kind enough to bring me in early in my kind of second career in publishing and I was doing quite a lot of workshops face to face in China and you know, other parts of Asia now.

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But yeah, like, it's given me like this quite interesting perspective on some of the problems that non native english speaking colleagues will face in different, in different regions. So, and that's been the focus of what we do and what we try to help with like all of these years is, you know, English should never be like a limiting factor for people's publication success. In fact, that's even the slogan of one of the big editing companies out there, I believe so. But we have to find ways to, to level the playing field. And that for me is the wonderful thing about AI and all of the tools that we now have access to that researchers have access to.

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Now in the last two years, two and a half years, three years, like it's really been a great leveler for researchers around the world, it's no longer necessary to even speak a word of English. You can still create like, you know, decent articles that can go off to be published in international journals. So yeah, I mean, cultural differences notwithstanding, it's been a really fascinating time these last few years.

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Sowmya: You're also very involved with supporting early career researchers. That's been another area where you've been quite involved in. So tell us a little bit about what you do for early career researchers and what also do you think publishers ought to do for early career researchers?

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Gareth: Yeah, so again, through my academic background, like working with young students, PhD. students, master's students, like these early career researchers that we like to kind of categorize, you know, people who are just starting in their research careers, their publishing careers from the perspective of publishers. And a kind of fun fact around this is that of course most of those researchers never stay in academia, they won't stay in research careers, they won't continue to publish their research.

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So, nurturing early career researchers from the publisher perspective is while on the one hand worthwhile. Of course, we also know that upwards of 90% of these researchers will not stay in a research career. So, a lot of what we do is to try to emphasize transferable skills and things that you learn as an academic, as a researcher that you will then be able to use, rely on and develop in other employment opportunities in the future. And it was really interesting from my own perspective because I never really expected that I would have this second career in publishing and sales and marketing and all this stuff like business development and giving presentations. But an awful lot of the skills that I had developed as an academic, not just writing and making reports and, and all that stuff, but how to talk to people, how to conduct myself in interviews and talking to people and doing, you know, business relationships and all that kind of stuff.

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Many of these are skills that you do develop as a researcher, but you just never kind of realize that there are many other, you know, avenues that you could go in like in the future. And peer review is one great example. Again, we always use the analogy, if your boss gives you a document to comment on, what are you going to do? Are you going to try and find as many ways as possible to criticize it and, you know, knock it down, as many researchers do when they perform peer review. Of course they try to be negative, they try to stop the paper from getting published.

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But you know, in the real world if you did that, you wouldn't last very long, you wouldn't survive very long. So, being constructive in peer review is a really, really important transferable skill. You know, for real world situations.

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Sowmya: Absolutely. I think there's a lot of publishing is a very detail oriented field and I think you have to know the specifics in order to be in this particular field.

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And I think that's an amazing transferable skill because you can't just stay on the surface and do things right. So, that's amazing. So, either one in your view, right, for this author, researcher, the author who is the researcher, plus the publishing, for there to be a healthy ecosystem that sort of works. If you were to give publishers, let's say, three advice, so to speak, or three recommendations, let's put it that way. What is it that you would put fourth for them?

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Gareth: The first thing would be to, to really put more effort and energy and money into what publishers call community engagement, which is, you know, the teams that publishers have whose job it is to kind of get their researchers, you know, engaged with the publisher, get their peer reviewers engaged with the publisher, their editorial teams and so on. But it doesn't work if that's just one publisher because as we said before, researchers are not like shackled to individual publishers and often they don't realize like you know, what publishers do and how publishers are related to journals. So, I would also like, in addition to community building and engagement initiatives, encourage publishers to work much more closely together within subject areas if possible. Because those are the areas, the verticals, whatever you want to call it, that within which researchers exist. They're, you know, in neuroscience or in paleontology or in, you know, molecular biology or whatever.

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So, much more cross collaboration would also be a great thing. And thirdly, this is the most kind of unlikely to happen I would say, but like, if there was a way to provide metrics and ways of assessment for researchers that are not simply based upon the quality of the journal in which they publish. And I'm aware that we do have things like the DORA initiative and other metrics are out there, but publishers I think could do an awful lot more to encourage researchers. A piece of research published in a peer reviewed journal is a fantastic achievement. And this kind of massive hierarchy that we currently have between I published a Nature paper and I published a paper in a journal that might not be in Scopus Q1 or Q2, it might be like, you know, less well regarded, is a very false dichotomy because, you know, research can be groundbreaking, can be paradigm shifting irrespective of the journal in which you publish it in.

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And I think that research is outside of like the big research producing countries, the native English speaking countries are often very well aware of this because, you know, you're publishing in your native language, you're publishing in journals that are well respected within your community but may not be well known like in the international sphere. So, those are my three Gareth recommendations for public.

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Sowmya: That's fantastic. Thank you so much. So if you weren't in publishing or in research, what would you have been? It's just a fun question. You can wear yourself.

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Gareth: Oh my God, I'm not going to answer that truthfully. No, If I wasn't. No, I think that I was always interested in natural history and animals and the natural world. So, probably if I hadn't gotten into paleontology, which for me very neatly combined like my interest in evolution and the way that animals and plants change over time with being outside and finding fossils. I probably would have worked as a journalist or been in some kind of travel related industry. I would expect, like when I was young I wanted to be an air traffic controller, but I can't see, so I was never able to like get into that line of work.

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Sowmya: So, it is still very close to publishing. You wanted to be a journalist?

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Gareth: So yeah, I think so, yeah.

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Sowmya: Super. It was wonderful talking to you, Gareth. Any other closing comments or thoughts that you want to share with our audience here today?

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Gareth: Well, thanks for listening and it's great to have the opportunity to participate in initiatives like this. Kriyadocs Publisherspeak Podcast series is fantastic. So, I hope everybody will enjoy listening to this and we'd love to, you know, engage more and get in touch with anybody that has any further questions, especially about dinosaurs or about peer review, Reviewer Credits, 4Evolution. Those are the two companies that I spend my time working for at the moment. And thank you so much, Sowmya, for the chance to do this. It's great to meet you.

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Sowmya: It's wonderful. Thank you so much, Gareth, for being on The Publisherspeak Podcast. Dinosaurs, Reviewer Credits, you know, peer review.  It was a wonderful set of discussions that we had. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us.

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Gareth: Thank you for having me.

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