Conclusion

All journals, regardless of discipline, business model, publisher or location, benefit from completing the Self-Assessment tool which is freely available to the scholarly journal publishing community. It gives journals an opportunity to reflect on their peer review practices and to consider how they can improve in areas where they may be relatively weak, in the spirit of providing greater quality in the practice of peer review. The model responses illustrating best practice, which we have synthesized can be shared with journals after they have completed the Self-Assessment, provide an invaluable resource for other journals to guide them in providing a high quality peer review service for their authors. Rather than being complacent about their current practice, and acknowledging that most journals may employ best practice in some areas, journals always have room for improvement, particularly with changing expectations in subject communities and advances in technology. In this respect there is a great opportunity for publishers to be influencers and early adopters of process change. The Self-Assessment has limitations, notably that not all questions are appropriate to all subject communities, however, we believe the general approach can help journal teams – whether editors, managing editors, reviewers or publishers – to reflect in depth on their peer review processes, to identify areas of weakness in those processes, to highlight gaps in knowledge of technical solutions that exist to improve the processes, and to draw attention to inconsistencies in the way that journals communicate with authors, reviewers and editors.