• Provide a fair, robust and timely critique that is useful for the authors in improving their manuscript
• Declare all conflicts of interests. Do not permit personal prejudice to influence the peer review process, and do not introduce considerations that are irrelevant to the review criteria
• Do not take calculated or undue advantage of knowledge gained during the peer review process
• Ensure that the criteria to be applied to are informed and complied with
• Do not agree to engage in peer review outside their area of expertise
• Give proper consideration to research which challenges or changes accepted ways of thinking

• What kind of review (blind, open report, open ID, etc.) does the journal offer?
• Do you need to find or suggest reviewers?
• Does the journal publish the reviewers` identity or/and report?
• Will the journal allow cooperation with editors and reviewers to enhance the quality of the manuscript?
• Will the journal publicly publish the submitted manuscript before peer-review?

• Sign your review
• Enter open discussion with the authors where possible
• More effective outcomes can be achieved if a direct contact is established with the author for clarification or to resolve incompleteness.
• Publish your review if possible
• Some journals offer the opportunity to publish the report with the article.
• Ask for the data
• The Peer Reviewers' Openness Initiative (PRO) initiative gives the power to the reviewers to drive this change by requesting access to the underlying data in order to do an adequate review. The organizers urge reviewers to demand access to data from editors or directly from the authors, if this is permitted, in order “to increase the quality of the published research by creating an expectation of open research practices.”
• Register your report
• Review services such as Publons or PeerJ allow reviewers to keep track of their review activities and get recognition for them by collecting review credits.
• Clarify your rights
• As open access of review reports is increasingly becoming an accepted option in peer review, it is in the best interest of the reviewer to clarify the licensing rights concerning the report with the publishers.

Transparency improves research and publishing system on several different levels. Firstly, allowing public access to peer reviews increases transparency and trust in the system. The whole process of scientific research and publication is based on trust. The peer review system operates on the assumption that authors, reviewers and all involved stakeholders act genuinely in a transparent manner. However, if editors cannot take face value the author’s suggestions for reviewers or assume authors want to have their work peer reviewed and improved, publishers will introduce limitations in the process in order to protect the integrity of the system (e.g. BioMed Central disabled the option of allowing to invite author-suggested reviewers). On the other side, authors’ trust within the system can fade when the submitted manuscript is leaked by a reviewer, and shared on the internet without consent. Such breach of confidentiality or examples of favoritism based on friendship, and reviewer misconduct due to close working relations with the author, can all lead up to broken trust in the research community, which hinders the development of the publishing system. These examples strengthen the belief that the secrecy involved in the process generate corruption and malice, while transparency could the re-introduce trustinto the system, which could increase validity and credibility of scientific research and publishing.

Secondly, openness and transparency are essential ingredients of innovation. Within the strengthening open science discourse, transparency is requirement to improve engagement, exchange of ideas and cooperations among different actors (whether private, public or civil society/third sector) to co-create innovative products and solutions to scientific and social problems.

• For a general free online course during which besides the main principles of peer reviewing, other important issues, such as data sharing and transparency are discussed with registered researchers you can go to the Publons Academy.
• Some libraries also offer courses, sometimes together with publishers.
• Peer review has some generalities but is also journal specific. Most publishers and journals provide their own guidelines/instructions in peer review (see some examples in the list below). If you want to get an idea what peer review reports look like, you can visit some journals that publish the review reports publicly with the article. These journals are for example: BMJ, Open Biology , Open Science and Biomed Central (journals labelled with “open peer review”) .

• APA
• BMJ Training materials
• Elsevier Becoming a reviewer
• Wiley Becoming a Reviewer: Elsevier also provides information in a serie on Youtube: How to Review a Manuscript

• being a part of the research community,
• having advanced access to the latest research,
• contributing to the pool of knowledge in a given field,
• act as a gatekeeper for quality in an area of science that I know and care about.

• Monetary compensation. Independent review services (Rubrique) charge for their services, which covers partially the fees paid to the reviewers themselves.
• Monetary reward system for reviewers (Veruscript publisher) with options: They can take a cash reward; save up credits to put towards their own publishing costs in the future; or donate these credits to help researchers who want to publish but cannot afford APCs.
• Credit system (Publons) where peer reviewers receive merits for various levels of reviewing activities. This serves both as a reward and a motivation for participating in the review process: one merit for completing a review, one more credit for being verified by an editor, one more credit if the full content of the review is published, and additional credits for giving or receiving endorsement to/from other reviewers.
• Integrating review work in the academic career system. It is very important for reviewers to receive credit for their work, so counting review work in the academic advancement system or making it a requirement in the hiring process would definitely mean acknowledgement for all voluntary scholarly contributions.
• Peer review work can be acknowledged as academic output, when made visible and integrated into scholarly work (in Croatia review work is part of institutional reporting).
• A Proposed Currency System for Academic Peer Review Payments Using the BlockChain Technology (Spearpoint 2017)

• Transparency helps to identify potential conflicts of interest, and reduce potential manipulations of the peer review process
• By disclosing reviewer identities or reports, reviewers are held accountable by the scholarly community for the quality, content, and professionalism of their reviews
• Making reviewers' names known tends to increase fairness in peer review for the authors
• Papers published under open peer review process show high citation performance within their fields.

• The primary incentive for a reviewer is, in principle, to contribute to their field of research, and participate as a gate-keeper to confirm that a specific piece of research is valid.
• The second incentive is for a reviewer to receive official acknowledgment for their contribution to the peer review process of paper. Given the amount of time dedicated by researchers on peer-reviewing others' work, this is an important aspect to ensure continued participation from scholars worldwide. In open peer review, this includes allowing reviewers to sign their reports and publish them alongside the paper itself, acknowledgement of the review work by name, or allowing open post-publication peer review.
• Publishers can create further incentives, via waiving publication charges for their reviewers, acknowledging them on the journal pages, giving reviewers feedback on the quality and outcome of their review, rewarding the best reviewers with appointments to the editorial board, or travel awards for reviewers with numerous quality contributions.

• 60% of editors have difficulty in finding qualified reviewers
• 64% of authors in HSS and 63% in STM who have yet to review a paper would like formal training
• Young researchers, in particular, require guidance on how to get peer review right. Investing in training the next generation of researchers can have strong benefits across the publishing industry in general, but for individual publishers this helps build trust from these researchers and suggests that they will be more likely to review for them in the future.