Over 1600 researchers from more than 60 countries around the world have been recognized by IOP Publishing for their services to journal publishing. The Reviewer Awards for 2019, which have just been unveiled, sees researchers honoured for their peer-review contributions to 53 journals that are published by IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World.
For each journal, one reviewer was selected as a “Reviewer of the Year” while several others were picked as an “outstanding reviewer”. Among those was Abhik Sanyal from Jangipur College, University of Kalyani in India, who was announced as reviewer of the year for the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
Sanyal says he enjoys peer review, particularly when it comes to learning about the latest research. He doesn’t receive funding for research from his institution as it is a teaching college, but following the lockdown in India due to the global COVID-19 health crisis, Sanyal has been still able to do a “huge amount of work” via online tools, especially to support his students. He usually peer reviews between 12 and 18 articles each year, but says that the number of requests to do so has reduced following the pandemic. IOP Publishing launches dedicated resource for researchers in China
But for Yi Weng, a senior optical-systems engineer at NeoPhotonics Corporation in the US, there hasn’t been a huge change in the number of requests he has had to peer review articles. Weng reviews more than 100 manuscripts a year and was Reviewer of the Year for Journal of Optics. He says that despite COVID-19, communication technologies have helped to “overcome the tremendous obstacles” resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. “I am having the feeling that our scientific community has become an integral part of the solution,” he says.
Weng says NeoPhotonics has been maintaining a skeleton workforce for only essential operations during the lockdown. But he adds that their research projects have not been hugely hit thanks to the ability to remotely control experiments. “We are all learning to communicate and do research and business in innovative ways that will be a big part of the new normal going forward,” says Weng, adding that he thinks the restrictions due to COVID-19 pandemic will be “fully overcome” over the coming year.
To see the complete list of IOP Reviewer awards, see here.
