Publons

The American Society for Microbiology is proud to be partnered with Publons to recognize our expert peer reviewers and raise the status of peer review.

What is Publons?

Publons is a free service for researchers to effortlessly track, verify and showcase their previously hidden peer review and editorial contributions across all the world’s journals, in full compliance with journal review policies.

With a Publons account, researchers have access to verified evidence of their peer review and editorial contributions for inclusion in their CV, bio, and funding and promotion applications.

Why recognize review?

Peer review is at the heart of the research ecosystem. We rely on our peer reviewers to help validate findings, qualify their importance and identify misleading or fraudulent work. Expert peer review improves the quality of scholarly communication and pace of discovery.

For years, peer review work has not been appropriately recognized, largely because the fragmented and anonymous nature of the work made it hard for researchers to provide evidence of all their reviewing contributions. With increasing pressure to publish and inadequate recognition for review, it is easy to understand why many researchers find little time for reviewing.

By giving researchers the recognition they deserve for their critical peer review and editorial contributions, we can improve the speed and quality of research communication.

How does it work?

When you submit a review for one of ASM's participating journals, you will have the option to add a verified record of that review to your Publons profile (through the manuscript submission and peer review system).

After you’ve added your first review, you can choose to have all future reviews performed for ASM's participating journals automatically added to your profile. Simply enable the “Automatically add reviews for partnered journals” option in your profile settings.

Review privacy

ASM has implemented a blind and unpublished policy across all its journals on Publons where only the year of the review and the name of the Journal is displayed. Open peer review reports in mSystems are accessible from the published article on msystems.asm.org.

Sign up to Publons for free

To sign up to, or learn more about Publons, please visit the Publons for researchers page.

Alternatively you can refer to the Publons FAQs page.