Crossref is a not-for-profit organisation that interlinks a variety of online academic content including articles, conference proceedings and data sets using Digital Object Identifier (DOI) technology. By doing so it aims to make such content easier to find, cite, link, and assess. This month will see Crossref extend its infrastructure to include the management of DOIs for peer review, enabling the scientific discussion surrounding published research to be searchable and citable. This new offering will encompass referee reports, decision letters, and author responses as well as post-publication reviews, each an important academic contribution to the scholarly record.

Open peer review has been in focus during the recent Peer Review Week 2017 and has been embraced by journals such as F1000Research, which publishes referee reports in real time. This timely new inclusion by Crossref will aid transparent peer review and will provide further insight and context for researchers reading publications. Crossref hopes that the new inclusion will provide recognition for peer reviewers and lead to enhanced scholarly discussion, reviewer accountability and publishing transparency, while also facilitating peer review analysis and research.

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Summary by Louise Niven, DPhil from Aspire Scientific