Review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) processes significantly affect how faculty direct their own career and scholarly progression. Although RPT practices vary between and within institutions, and affect various disciplines, ranks, institution types, genders, and ethnicity in different ways, some consistent themes emerge when investigating what faculty would like to change about RPT. For instance, over the last few decades, RPT processes have generally increased the value placed on research, at the expense of teaching and service, which often results in an incongruity between how faculty actually spend their time vs. what is considered in their evaluation. Another issue relates to publication practices: most agree RPT requirements should encourage peer-reviewed works of high quality, but in practice, the value of publications is often assessed using shortcuts such as the prestige of the publication venue, rather than on the quality and rigor of peer review of each individual item.

The Global State of Peer Review is one of the largest ever studies into the practice of scholarly peer review around the world focusing on four questions: 1. Who is doing the review? 2. How efficient is the peer review process? 3. What do we know about peer review quality? 4. What does the future hold?

The acceptance rate for eLife manuscripts with male last authors was significantly higher than for female last authors, and this gender inequity was greatest when the team of reviewers was all male; mixed-gender gatekeeper teams lead to more equitable peer review outcomes.

We present an agent-based model of paper publication and consumption that allows to study the effect of two different evaluation mechanisms, peer review and reputation, on the quality of the manuscripts accessed by a scientific community.

Citizen science: crowdsourcing for systematic reviews looks at how people can contribute their expertise to scientific studies using new online platforms - even if they don’t think of themselves as researchers or scientists.

Virtual peer review using videoconferencing or teleconferencing appears promising for reducing costs by avoiding the need for reviewers to travel, but again any consequences for quality have not been adequately assessed.

Article covers basic principles and summarise best practices, indicating how to use Open Peer Review to achieve best value and mutual benefits for all stakeholders and the wider research community.