How can the often invisible labour of peer review be meaningfully recognised and rewarded? This question was at the heart of the recent hybrid workshop, Turning Recommendations into Reality: Implementing Mechanisms for Recognizing and Rewarding Peer Review, organised by ALLEA and the CoARA Working Group on Recognizing and Rewarding Peer Review in Berlin. Bringing together funders, research institutions, publishers, and researchers, the workshop aimed to move beyond principles toward concrete, implementable solutions.
The event built on the work of the CoARA Working Group on Recognizing and Rewarding Peer Review, which recently developed a set of recommendations outlining how peer review can be better acknowledged and credit as a scholarly output across the research ecosystem. These recommendations emphasise the need to move away from narrow, metric-based assessment systems toward more holistic approaches that recognise the diverse contributions, such as peer review activities, researchers make to knowledge production.
Discussions throughout the workshop highlighted the complexity of recognising peer review practices. Participants noted that while openness and transparency in peer review are increasingly encouraged, disciplinary contexts differ significantly. In some fields, open peer review may promote collaboration and accountability, while in others anonymity remains essential due to competitive pressures and power imbalances between early-career and senior researchers. As a result, flexible approaches to recognition and credit are necessary.
Another key theme was sustainability. With the number of research publications steadily increasing, many participants emphasised the growing imbalance between submissions and the availability of qualified reviewers. Strengthening recognition for peer review—whether through formal acknowledgement in CVs and assessments, or through digital infrastructures such as ORCID—was seen as a crucial step toward ensuring that reviewing remains a valued and shared responsibility within the research community.
To translate recommendations into action, participants took part in collaborative design sprints to develop pilot proposals for testing new recognition mechanisms. These ranged from integrating peer review activities into researcher evaluation systems to developing interoperable infrastructures for recording review contributions. The proposals will feed into further discussions within the CoARA community and may serve as starting points for institutional or cross-organisational pilots.
By bringing together diverse stakeholders to explore practical solutions, the workshop marked an important step toward making peer review more visible, valued, and sustainable within evolving research assessment systems.
If your institution/organisation/department would consider piloting any of the recommendations, please register your interest here or contact Maria Ronald (ronald@allea.org).