 I'm Lucy Llan, I'm the Scotland Communications Officer at the London School of Economics. Peer review is a new support area for the library and I'll outline the journey so far and some possible future developments that we're thinking of. You'll notice that the images that I've got here have nothing to do with peer review but they're all from the New York Met's recent collection of CC Zero licensed images so I thought they'd make it a little bit more interesting. So to start with some background on research support at LSE. The research support team at LSE is well established and we've been supporting academic staff and research students with open access publishing, theses, bibliometrics. But last year my role was created to develop a publishing advice service and to explore new ways of supporting publishing at LSE. So what's the problem with peer review? Single and double blind review is still the norm in most disciplines but it means the activity is hidden from view so the really productive peer reviewers are just as hidden as the so-called freeloaders. Some researchers see peer reviews as a burden and one more admin task on a growing list of things that distracts from research time. A recent post in the blog with traction watch described how some researchers are using a zero-sum reviewing formula to make sure that they don't put in any more work than they have to although they do recognise the importance of peer review. The burden across many intersections is unevenly shared so US researchers are reviewing more than they publish and researchers in China are publishing twice as many articles as they review and our recent article on nature found that fewer women are being invited to perform peer review and it seems that these problems are affecting the reviews that researchers are writing and a common complaint from authors to journal editors is about the poor reviews they receive on their work. Recent study by Taylor and Francis found that just one in ten reviewers have been to any formal training on peer review but most would like the opportunity. However the unequal burden of peer review is difficult to understand because clearly there are more researchers becoming qualified to perform peer review each year and there are some researchers who have never reviewed but would like to sometimes they think they need to wait to be asked or at least until they publish something before they can become peer reviewers. But what are some possible solutions? There are many new and evolving models of peer review which include some form of recognition reward or incentive but what really matters is the review content which should be fair, constructive and thorough. So what about offering training and doing effective peer reviewing? And what about using PhD students as a source of well informed reviewers? They are immersed in the literature of their research topic and can often be more up to date than their more established colleagues. They are keen to get a fresh look at research especially in disciplines with long publication delays and peer review can also help to improve their own academic writing by critiquing that of others. I think the responsibility for improving peer review should probably fall with everyone on this list but different resources will probably work for different people so more established researchers will probably feel comfortable getting support from their societies whereas PhD students are comfortable coming to the library for research support. So we decided to try and offer some peer reviewed training within the library. The first workshop was very kindly delivered by Taylor and Friends. The content was a basic outline of the publishing and review process with a practical exercise at the end. This was reviewing a mock article and then they would review the article in groups. Some feedback was collected immediately after the session and most people said they found it useful in some way. They gave a clear understanding of how reviewers are chosen and the practical exercise was identified as the strongest part of the workshop. Six months later I collected some more feedback on this workshop and the attendees had recognised how it had changed their research activities not only as a peer reviewer but also in responding to reviews of their own work and knowing what reviewers are looking for. They were feeling much more confident as reviewers and had learnt how to structure their feedback and what to include. A second peer review workshop came about when an LSE academic got in touch and wanted to compare his own workshop to what Taylor and Francis were offering. His notes seemed much more thorough and he also brought his own experience as a reviews editor to the workshop. So I invited him to lead a workshop for the library and he very kindly agreed to do so. Dr Edgar Whitley is based in the Department of Management at LSE. As a reviews editor of a journal he'd recognised that there were some issues with the reviews that he was receiving and he also recognised the tendency within scholarly communications to not make certain rules and understandings explicit and it's a particular problem for PhD students and junior researchers. So before the workshop we worked together to make the content a bit more general for our audience beyond his own PhD students and the workshop covers why peer review is important, why a paper might be rejected and attendees are invited to perform peer review on a real paper that was submitted to Edgar's journal and these are collected in advance. During the workshop small groups worked together to review each other's reviews and then come up with a final decision on the paper based on their discussion. PhD students are encouraged to volunteer to start reviewing for journals and finally they have an opportunity to ask questions of Edgar as a reviews editor and these range from how long you should wait to get a response from a journal to discussions about open access publishing. So the immediate feedback was very positive and encouraging and the workshop seemed to demystify the process of publishing and getting your work peer reviewed. As one attendee put it, I didn't know who the reviewers were, it turns out there are people just like us and they don't always have to be right. At least one PhD student did start reviewing for a journal as a result of the workshop. So in the future we're thinking about developing a more accessible workshop for undergraduates who are editing a couple of LSE student journals. We're trying to figure out when the best time for PhD students to fit in training is but that's a problem for all of our workshops. And I've been looking into developing some online resources particularly looking at the University of Manchester's My Research Essentials which has a peer review module which has been really helpful in this. Thank you for listening.