Good peer review starts with knowing who your reviewers actually are — their real expertise, their real track record. One of the key reasons for researchers to accept an invitation to review is them being genuinely interested in reading the work, which means the manuscript should be close to their research interests and expertise. And the best estimate anyone can have of an academic’s expertise are their publications.

OpenAlex is a trusted source of open data for the scholarly community, which Global Campus uses to, among other things, identify (peer) reviewers. Although the OpenAlex set is comprehensive, it is built automatically. Meaning that papers can be missing, identities of people can be wrongfully merged, and people can be linked to wrong publications. It doesn't happen all the time, but in a dataset as large as OpenAlex, issues will always be there. The best way of fixing this, is to let authors claim their own profile in OpenAlex, allowing them to claim which papers and affiliations are actually theirs, and which aren't.

One could argue that an unclaimed profile is just a minor inconvenience since the vast majority of the data is still correct. But unclaimed profiles also quietly drag the match quality every time someone is searching for the right reviewer. And isn't it in the interest of all these funders, publishers, universities, libraries etc... that work with OpenAlex data to have an as reliable set of data as possible? Everyone can see the quality, but also the gaps, in OpenAlex data because it's open and transparent. Let's all inform the researchers we work with how easy it is to make OpenAlex even more reliable.

The fix takes under 5 minutes: find your profile, claim it, verify your work. Your expertise becomes findable — and every correction makes the shared commons a little more reliable for everyone searching it. (Full guide on our previous blog post)

(Part of a series of blog posts for Peer Review Week - Peer Review Capacity: Volume, Speed, and Quality)