Who Creates the Future of AMS Peer Review? Maybe You Do!

Banners of 12 AMS journals laid out in a grid

By Gwendolyn Whittaker, AMS Publications Director

For Peer Review Week 2023, AMS and other scholarly publishers have been asked to reflect on both the essential role that peer review plays in scholarly communication, and also “the future of peer review.” In this second of our two Peer Review Week posts, we’ll take a look at how all stakeholders in AMS publications can contribute to discussions about evolving AMS peer review–and where those discussions might take place.

An evolving practice

In support of its Mission to advance science for the benefit of society, AMS publishes 12 peer-reviewed, highly regarded scientific journals. That high regard is the result of deep commitment over many decades from AMS’s volunteer leadership and from thousands of volunteer Editors and reviewers across the disciplines AMS represents. 

Researchers will take part in peer review throughout their career—sometimes as an author, sometimes playing the role of reviewer. Some will take on a journal editor role as well, with the responsibility of facilitating the review process and determining the ultimate fate of manuscripts. 

Peer review is a human endeavor, and is thus subject to human failings. Individual and systemic biases, along with global economic and social inequities, impact who has access to both the process and the results of peer review. But as with all human endeavors, its users can re-shape peer review to better serve its purposes.

As firsthand users of the tool that is peer review, researchers are the first to point out that peer review is not perfect, and the first to note where change is needed to better serve the scientific community.

At another level, disciplinary communities—such as those convened by AMS through its scientific meetings and journals—set ethical standards and best practices that reflect the communities’ values and expectations. The peer review process can and does change as those needs and values evolve. 

Peer review at AMS

For AMS, this ongoing “review of peer review” is centered in the work of the Publications Commission. Every AMS Chief Editor and the Chair of the BAMS Editorial Board is on the Commission, bringing constructive and insightful feedback from their editors, authors, reviewers, and readers to the Commission’s deliberations. The Commission sets best practices for editors, authors, and reviewers to follow, makes recommendations to AMS staff on improving processes and platforms, and provides policy and strategic recommendations to the AMS Council. 

In recent years, a particular focus for the Commission has been how to integrate AMS’s overall commitment to equity, inclusion, and justice into the publications endeavor. The Commission summarized its thinking so far in a recent editorial published in all the journals: “Equity, Inclusion, and Justice: An Opportunity for Action for AMS Publications Stakeholders.” As noted in the editorial, the Commission will be looking closely at results from AMS’s organization-wide Equity Assessment (currently underway), which will likely inform how AMS peer review evolves. 

As always, peer review at AMS will be shaped by the commitment and needs of researchers themselves, and also by scrutiny and constructive critiques from those who rely on the results—and who need the scientific endeavor to continue serving society into the future.

Have thoughts of your own on the future of peer review? Want to know more about peer review at AMS? Want to know how to volunteer to be considered as a reviewer or editor? Find out more or email us at [email protected]. We’ll be happy to hear from you!

What Do Non-Scientists Need to Understand about Peer Review?

Thoughts from AMS 2024 Editor’s Award Recipients

Peer Review Week 2023 logo

Understanding the role of peer review in science is vital not only for scientists themselves, but also for all of us who live in a society that relies on scientific research. Each September during Peer Review Week, AMS and other scholarly publishers highlight the essential role that peer review plays in scholarly communication.

In this first of two Peer Review Week posts, we’re hearing from some of AMS’s outstanding peer reviewers, recipients of the 2024 Editor’s Award, about what they think non-researchers need to understand about peer review.

At a basic level it is a check on, “do I believe the results presented here and the implications that are claimed?The check is made by other researchers working independently in the field. The checking of a single paper isn’t exhaustive, but there is an ongoing process—results and ideas established in one paper will, if they are of any significance, be re-examined and developed further in subsequent papers, which will themselves be peer reviewed.

Dr. Peter Haynes, Cambridge University
Dr. David Bodine

For non-researchers, I think it’s important to understand that peer review requires substantial effort … by volunteer reviewers, editors, and [the] scientists submitting manuscripts. A well-coordinated review process by all involved improves the quality and ensures the integrity of scientific research.

Dr. David Bodine, University of Oklahoma

Dr. Elizabeth Yankovsky

The peer review process is the only barrier standing between the writing of a scientific study and its publication. It is very easy for an unsubstantiated or erroneous paper to set an entire field back by years. In my opinion, the peer review process is as important as the research that goes into a given paper. … A given scientist may have one perspective and associated biases. Through peer review, the results are assessed by other scientists and are judged against the state of knowledge of the field. To push our boundary with the unknown forward, scientists must rely on both the historical backbone of their field as well as thorough review by their modern-day peers.

Dr. Elizabeth Yankovsky, New York University

Just because a paper was published after undergoing “peer review” does not make it absolutely correct or perfect, nor is it the final message on that idea. Unfortunately I feel the phrase “peer reviewed” is often used to imply some absolute consensus on a subject has been reached, when in reality it’s an ongoing, necessary criticism of the science that we do. As scientists we are constantly peer-reviewing each other’s work, and this may spark new, contrary ideas to be published that refute earlier findings.

Dr. Luke Madaus, Jupiter Intelligence
Dr. Sarah Buckland

Popular culture oftentimes misconstrues science in either the extreme of being purely political/agenda-driven or being the ultimate source of truth without question. The truth is, science is not ultimate, and understandings of processes and concepts are dynamic, and, as is especially evident in interdisciplinary research, scientists do have perspectives shaped by experiences. While I also cannot deny that bias exists in scientific fields and that contrasting perspectives may filter out at times, authentically anonymous and double-anonymous peer review processes (i.e., the reviewer not knowing the authors’ name(s)), act as guardrails to significantly reduce bias. [If] these processes remain clean and the selected reviewers are indeed experts in the field of the papers that they review, this significantly aids in ensuring that the end product is of the highest quality. The existence of these processes is why academic journals are deemed among the most credible sources of scientific information.

Dr. Sarah Buckland, University of the West Indies

Dr. Mimi Hughes

I think what I wish non-researchers understood about the scientific review process is how many eyes are on these papers before they’re published, and how that regularly improves the science and writing of the end-product. Most reviewers take the responsibility very seriously, and indeed are usually hesitant when they haven’t “found enough to fix” in a paper they review. It is typically a truly rigorous process.

Dr. Mimi Hughes, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory

Dr. Aaron Hill

I think non-researchers should know that peer review is only good and valuable when it is conducted from an unbiased position. It is vitally important that authors receive unbiased, external perspectives on their work in order to ensure that any gaps or misunderstandings can be addressed, and that the science is technically sound. Peer review is just ONE step in the scientific process as well, and sometimes bad work slips through the cracks of review. But peer review is a critical component to upholding and advancing science.

Dr. Aaron Hill, Colorado State University

Dr. Qiaohong Sun

Peer review serves as a crucial method for the scientific community to uphold the quality and credibility of scientific information accessible to the public. A paper passing peer review doesn’t guarantee absolute perfection, it indicates a level of examination and approval by experts in the field to some extent at the current time.

Dr. Qiaohong Sun, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology

Dr. Sebastian Lerch

Peer review is a critical control mechanism in the scientific process. Mistakes can happen and may still get through the process. However, the collective nature of peer review and subsequent scrutiny by the scientific community help correct errors over time. This in particular highlights the importance of making research reproducible by publishing data and code.

Dr. Sebastian Lerch, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Dr. Andrew Feldman

It works! It is the main mechanism that keeps science reliable and transparent. Scientists respect and cite published work. In order to get science published, it needs to be read by 2-4 anonymous colleagues and editors and then revised. Even when it goes wrong and a paper is published with an error or not-well-supported argument, researchers are good at detecting this after the fact. It is a robust process that keeps the advancement of knowledge at a high-quality and transparent level.

Dr. Andrew Feldman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The Volunteer Power behind Peer Review

by Tony Broccoli, AMS Publications Commissioner

The peer review process is essential for high-quality scientific publication. Most readers of BAMS are aware of this simple fact, but we often hear questions about the many volunteers who take part in the peer review process. What is the difference between editors and associate editors? How do we choose chief editors? To answer these and other questions as part of this year’s Peer Review Week, I will provide a quick look at the roles of volunteers who make the peer review process work.

TonyB

When a manuscript is submitted to one of the 11 technical journals published by AMS, it is examined by the chief editor of that journal. (Two AMS journals, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology and Journal of Climate have two co-chief editors.) If the manuscript meets basic standards of clarity, language, and content, the chief editor will assign an editor to handle it. The handling editor’s area of expertise will typically be consistent with the topic of the manuscript.

The next step for the handling editor is the selection of reviewers for the manuscript. Reviewers are also chosen on the basis of their expertise because they are being asked to make a technical assessment of the manuscript under consideration. Most manuscripts are assigned to two to three reviewers, who are expected to return their reviews in a specified length of time.

Once the reviews of a manuscript have been received, the handling editor is responsible for evaluating them and deciding the outcome of the peer review process. The editor may decide to 1) accept the manuscript without revision (this is quite rare); 2) require minor revisions that will be judged by the editor without further evaluation by the reviewers; 3) require major revisions, after which the revised manuscript will typically be subject to another round of evaluation by the reviewers; or 4) reject the manuscript as unsuitable for publication. In making a decision, the editor is not simply tallying the recommendations of the reviewers, but instead using the reviews to make an informed judgment about the manuscript.

Thus the scientific publication process depends critically on many people who generously donate their time. Reviewers are at the heart of the peer review process; this army of volunteers provides a critical evaluation of each manuscript and offers suggestions on how it can be made stronger. Reviewers who have a history of providing excellent and timely reviews are often invited to become associate editors, who agree to provide more frequent reviews, review manuscripts on short notice, and advise the editors of challenging or difficult cases.

Editors are frequently chosen from the ranks of associate editors who have performed their duties with distinction. Successful editors have certain attributes: they are excellent scientists, they have good judgment, and they have superior time-management skills. Each of these attributes is important for making sound decisions about manuscripts, communicating with authors and reviewers, and managing the unrelenting stream of incoming manuscripts in a timely manner.

Experience and accomplishment in per- forming the duties of an editor are among the primary considerations in identifying candidates for chief editor. Although this may be the most visible position among the volunteers who contribute to the peer review process in AMS Publications, it is by no means the most important. Reviewers, associate editors, editors, chief editors, and the AMS staff who work with them are all crucial to the scientific publishing enterprise. Regardless of which of these roles you occupy, you are making an important contribution to an essential element of scientific research.

To get involved, please follow this link to the AMS publications website.

Peer Review: A Foundational Component of Our Science

by Keith L. Seitter, CCM, AMS Executive Director
This week we join many other scientific publishers celebrating Peer Review Week to highlight the importance of high-quality peer review in the scientific process. The process of peer reviewing research results has been an indispensable component of the modern scientific enterprise: when scientists talk about having reached a consensus in some area of research, they mean that there is a consensus in the peer-reviewed literature. This week gives us an opportunity to focus on the importance of peer review while also recognizing the dedication of researchers around the world who make considerable commitments of time to ensure its continued success while usually receiving little or no explicit credit for those contributions.
When a researcher submits a manuscript presenting research results to a high-quality journal like those AMS publishes, the editor of the journal selects several experts in relevant specialties to review of the manuscript. These experts make sure the author(s) have carried out their experiments, observations, and/or analysis following sound practices and that their conclusions can be justified from the data and analysis they have provided. In their reviews, these experts identify weaknesses or flaws in experimental design or reasoning and suggest additional research and analysis that might be required, as well as other ways to improve the paper.
The editor collects these peer reviews and determines if the manuscript can be made suitable for publication. If the science is flawed and the paper cannot be made acceptable with a reasonable amount of additional work, the paper is rejected. More than one in three manuscripts submitted to AMS journals are rejected. The editor’s decision is provided to the authors, along with the full set of reviews with the names of the reviewers removed (unless the reviewer chooses otherwise), along with the editor’s decision. If the paper has not been rejected, the authors follow the guidance of the editors and reviewers to revise the paper, which then may face additional peer review under the editor’s direction. If the paper can reach the point that the editor is satisfied with the quality of the work, the manuscript is accepted for publication.
Peer review, even when implemented in the rigorous manner used by AMS, is not perfect, of course. Occasionally important research is initially rejected in peer review, or fundamentally incorrect research survives peer review to publication only to be shown later to be incorrect. Peer review done well, however, greatly reduces the chance of publication of poor or incorrect science, and experience has shown that overall the process is extremely successful. That is why scientists depend virtually exclusively on results presented in rigorously peer-reviewed journals and why major scientific assessments—like the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—rely on peer-reviewed literature from well-established, high-quality journals like those published by AMS.
Astute readers will have noticed that I refer to “high quality journals” multiple times above. It is important to make that distinction because there are journals vying for authors’ papers (and the income they provide) that do not put the time or expense into doing peer review with the rigor employed by the AMS journals. Authors, and the scientific enterprise itself, are best served by those journals that invest the resources needed to do the peer review to the highest standards. AMS journals enjoy membership in the elite group of such high quality journals that serve the atmospheric and related sciences.
Let me close with note of appreciation for those who maintain the very high standards of peer review for the AMS journals.  While the professional staff at AMS does a wonderful job of ensuring smooth and expedient reviews, as part of a positive author experience that is among the best in scientific publishing, it is the volunteers who serve as chief editors, editors, associate editors, and reviewers who dedicate the time and energy to maintain the AMS journals as world-class publications. And the reviewers especially deserve credit given that their efforts are, by design, mostly done anonymously for the collective good of science. All of us owe these dedicated individuals our thanks.

Peer Review Week 2017: 4. Shifting Demands of Integrity

For Journal of Hydrometeorology Chief Editor Christa Peters-Lidard, peer review upholds essential standards for a journal. “Maintaining that integrity is very important to me,” she said during an interview at the AMS Publications Commission meeting in Boston, in May. Historically, the burden of integrity has fallen on editors as much as authors and reviewers.

The peer review process we follow at the AMS is an anonymous process. Authors do not know who their reviewers are. So it’s really up to us, as the editors and chief editors, to ensure that the authors have a fair opportunity to not only get reviews that are constructive and not attacking them personally, but also by people that are recognized experts in the field.

Even when reviewers are not experts, “they know enough about it to ask the right questions, and that leads the author to write the arguments and discussion in a way that, in the end, can have more impact because more people can understand it.”
Anonymity has its advantages for upholding integrity, especially in relatively small field, like hydrometeorology. Peters-Lidard pointed anonymity helps reviewers state viewpoints honestly and helps authors receive those comments as constructive, rather than personal.
“In my experience there have been almost uniformly constructive reviews,” Peters-Lidard says, and that means papers improve during peer review. “Knowing who the authors are, we know what their focus has been, where their blind spots might be, and how we can lead them to recognize the full scope of the processes that might be involved in whatever they’re studying. Ultimately that context helps the reviewer in making the right types of suggestions.
But the need for integrity is subtly shifting its burden onto authors more and more heavily. Peters-Lidard spoke about the trend in science towards an end-to-end transparency in how conclusions were reached. She sees this movement in climate assessment work, for example, where the policy implications are clear. Other peer reviewed research developing this way.

We’re moving the direction where ultimately you have a repository of code that you deliver with the article….Part of that also relates to a data issue. In the geosciences we speak of ‘provenance,’ where we know not only the source of the data—you know, the satellite or the sensor—but we know which version of the processing was applied, when it was downloaded, and how it was averaged or processed. It’s back to that reproducibility idea a little bit but also there are questions about the statistical methods….We’re moving in this direction but we’re not there yet.

Hear the full interview:

Peer Review Week 2017: 3. Transparency Is Reproducibility

David Kristovich, chief editor of the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, explains how AMS peer review process, as a somewhat private process, ultimately produces the necessary transparency.
Peer review is an unpublished exchange between authors, editors and reviewers. It is meant to assure quality in a journal. At the same time, Kristovich noted that peer review is not just something readers are trusting, blindly. Rather, the peer review process is meant to lead to a more fundamental transparency—namely, it leads to papers that reveal enough to be reproducible.
“Transparency focuses on the way we tend to approach our science,” Kristovich said during an interview at the AMS Publications Commission meeting in Boston in May. “If someone can repeat all of the steps you took in conducting a study, they should come up with the same answer.”
“The most important part of a paper is to clearly define how you did all the important steps. Why did I choose this method? Why didn’t I do this, instead?”
Transparency also is enhanced by revealing information about potential biases, assumptions, and possible errors. This raises fundamental questions about the limits of information one can include in a paper, to cover every aspect of a research project.
“Studies often take years to complete,” Kristovich pointed out. “Realistically, can you put in every step, everything you were thinking about, every day of the study? The answer is, no you can’t. So a big part of the decision process is, ‘What is relevant to the conclusions I ended up with?’”
The transparency of scientific publishing then depends on peer review to uphold this standard, while recognizing that the process of science itself is inherently opaque to the researchers themselves, while they’re doing their work.
“The difference between scientific research and development of a product, or doing a homework assignment—thinking about my kids—is that you don’t know what the real answer is,” Kristovich said. Science “changes your thinking as you move along, so at each step you’re learning what steps you should be taking.”
You can hear the entire interview here.

Peer Review Week 2017: 2. What Makes a Good Review?

peer review week banner
At the AMS Annual Meeting panel on Peer Review last January, journal editors Tony Broccoli, Carolyn Reynolds, Walt Robinson, and Jeff Rosenfeld spoke about how authors and reviewers together make good reviews happen:
Robinson: If you want good reviews, and by good I mean insightful and constructive and that are going to help you make your paper better, the way to do that is to write a really good paper. Make sure your ducks are in a row before you send it in. You should have read over that and edited it multiple times. I’m going to, at some point in my life, write a self-help book in which the single word title is, “Edit!” because it applies to many parts of life. Have your colleagues—not even the co-authors—look at it. Buy the person in the office next door a beer to look over the paper and get their comment. There may be problems with the science–and none of our science is ever perfect–but if it’s a really well constructed, well formulated, well written paper, that will elicit really good reviews.
The flip side of that is, if the paper is indecipherable, you’ll get a review back saying, “I’m trying to figure this out” with a lot of questions, and often it’s major revisions. (We don’t reject that many things out of the box.)
The problem is, the author goes back and finally makes the paper at a standard he or she should have sent in the first time. It goes back to the reviewer, and then the reviewer understands the paper and comes back and starts criticizing the science. Then the author gets angry…”You didn’t bring that up the first time!” Well, that’s because the reviewer couldn’t understand the science the first time. So, if you want good, constructive reviews, write good papers!
Reynolds:  You want to make things as easy as possible for the reviewers. Make the English clear, make the figures clear. Allow them to focus on the really important aspects.
Broccoli: I would add, affirming what Walt said, that the best reviews constructively give the authors ideas for making their papers better. Some reviewers are comfortable taking the role as the gatekeeper and trying to say whether this is good enough to pass muster. But then maybe they aren’t as strong as need be at explaining what needs to be done to make the paper good enough. The best reviews are ones that apply high standards but also try to be constructive. They’re the reviewers I want to go back to.
Rosenfeld: I like Walt’s word, “Edit.” Thinking like an editor when you are a reviewer has a lot to do with empathy. In journals, generally, the group of authors is identical or nearly the same as the group of readers, so empathy is relatively easy. It’s less true in BAMS, but it still applies. You have to think like an editor would, “What is the author trying to do here? What is the author trying to say? Why are they not succeeding? What is it that they need to show me?” If you can put yourself in the shoes of the author—or in the case of BAMS, in the shoes of the reader—then you’re going to be able to write an effective review that we can use to initiate a constructive conversation with the author.
Broccoli: That reminds me: Occasionally we see a reviewer trying to coax the author into writing the paper the reviewer would have written, and that’s not the most effective form of review. It’s good to have diverse approaches to science. I would rather the reviewer try to make the author’s approach to the problem communicated better and more sound than trying to say, “This is the way you should have done it.”

Peer Review Week 2017: 1. Looking for Reviewers

peer review week banner
It’s natural that AMS–an organization deeply involved in peer review–participates in Peer Review Week 2017. This annual reflection on peer review was kicked off today by the International Congress of Peer Review and Scientific Publication in Chicago. If you want to follow the presentations there, check out the videos and live streams.
Since peer review is near and dear to AMS, we’ll be posting this week about peer review, in particular the official international theme, “Transparency in Review.”
To help bring some transparency to peer review, AMS Publications Department presented a panel discussion on the process in January at the 2017 AMS Annual Meeting in Seattle. Tony Broccoli, longtime chief editor of the Journal of Climate, was the moderator; other editors on the panel were Carolyn Reynolds and Yvette Richardson of Monthly Weather Review, Walt Robinson of the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, and Jeff Rosenfeld of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
You can hear the whole thing online, but we’ll cover parts of the discussion here over the course of the week.
For starters, a lot of authors and readers wonder where editors get peer reviewers for AMS journal papers. The panel offered these answers (slightly edited here because, you know, that’s what editors do):
Richardson: We try to evaluate what different types of expertise are needed to evaluate a paper. That’s probably the first thing. For example, if there’s any kind of data assimilation, then I need a data assimilation expert. If the data assimilation is geared toward severe storms, then I probably need a severe storms expert too. First I try to figure that out.
Sometimes the work is really related to something someone else did, and that person might be a good person to ask. Sometimes looking through what papers they are citing can be a good place to look for reviewers.
And then I try to keep reaching out to different people and keep going after others when they turn me down…. Actually, people are generally very good about agreeing to do reviews and we really have to thank them. It would all be impossible without that.
Reynolds: If you suggest reviewers when you submit to us, I’ll certainly consider them. I usually won’t pick just from the reviewers suggested by the authors. I try to go outside that group as well.
Broccoli: I would add, sometimes if there’s a paper on a topic where there are different points of view, or the topic is yet to be resolved, it can be useful to identify as at least one of the reviewers someone who you know may have a different perspective on that topic. That doesn’t mean you’re going to believe the opinion of that reviewer above the opinion of others but it can be a good way of getting a perspective on a topic.
Rosenfeld: Multidisciplinary papers can present problems for finding the right reviewers. For these papers, I do a lot of literature searching and hunt for that key person who happens to somehow intersect, or be in between disciplines or perspectives; or someone who is a generalist in some way, whose opinion I trust. It’s a tricky process and it’s a double whammy for people who do that kind of research because it’s hard to get a good evaluation.

•  •   •

If you’re interested in becoming a reviewer, the first step is to let AMS know. For more information read the web page here, or submit this form to AMS editors.
 

A Peer Review Conversation

by Jeff Rosenfeld, BAMS Editor in Chief, and Bob Rauber, AMS Publications Commissioner

Since this week has been declared Peer Review Week, the publishing blog, “Scholarly Kitchen,” is devoting a series of posts about the manuscript evaluation process that you might dread or love, depending on where you sit as an author, editor, or reviewer. They kicked off discussions with a round table on the future of peer review. You’ll find in that blog the usual gamut of projections about peer review—from business as usual to wholesale revolution. Given the many innovations in publishing lately, nobody seems to know what will happen next in this centuries-old tradition in science.

One thing the participants all seemed to agree on, however: in one form or another, peer review is here to stay. As Alice Meadows, director of communications for ORCID, the researcher identification consortium, puts it, “It is hard to imagine scholarly communication without some form of peer review.”

Those of us who have served as AMS editors will not be surprised by that sentiment, and not just because we rely so heavily on reviewers to provide their input into the publishing process. We know how valuable peer review is because the authors tell us.

It is not unusual to see an author’s final revisions arrive accompanied by a note to the editor saying ““Please thank the reviewers.” And it is not unusual to find “anonymous reviewers” thanked in the acknowledgements of published papers.

This happens even though not all of these authors have been entirely happy throughout the review process. Reviews usually mean authors spend additional time on a paper they thought was fine when they first submitted it. Despite that, the authors know their reviewers deserve thanks, and the authors freely give it.

They do this because they find that peer review is not just “essential to the communication of science.”  Peer review is, itself, scientific communication of the best kind.

We often picture peer review as criticism. One set of anonymous experts tells another expert how to write their article, what to say, and what not to say.

That’s hardly a model for scientists communicating with other scientists. It sounds downright regressive, actually—an intrusive but necessary form of telling authors what the standards are and where to throw out the junk. Thumbs up, or thumbs down.

But actually, more often than not, the thumb wiggles and points the way to success. Editors notice that when the review process is going well, the reviewers are not simply dictating terms for acceptance for the authors. What happens instead is conversation. It is often an even more intimate and honest exchange than one can get from colleagues down the hall. And like any good conversation, it involves iterations. Reviews go to authors, and the authors who take them seriously often reply unexpectedly, forcing reviewers to think again. In the best cases, reviewers and authors—and the editors who facilitate their two-way exchange—learn from each other and adapt.

The evidence of this conversation is in those citations AMS gives when naming the recipients of our Editor’s Awards each year. Sift through the Annual Meeting banquet programs and you’ll find many words of praise for an iterative communication. For example, the 2016 Journal of Hydrometeorology Editor’s Award went to W. Justin Baisden for “a series of rigorous and detailed reviews … resulting in a substantially improved paper.” Similarly, both Andrew Stewart (for the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology) and Matthew Kumjian (for Monthly Weather Review and Weather and Forecasting) were cited for how “constructive” their reviews were. And the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology singled out Tanya Spero Otte for “thought provoking reviews that led to significant manuscript improvements.”

Clearly this is what editors want, and this is what makes peer review a conversation. The manuscripts improve, and both sides learn. People often ask why scientists devote so much effort and time—often unpaid and at extremely inconvenient moments—to formulating reviews and considering authors’ responses. Like any scientific communication, it’s because reviewers, authors, editors, and ultimately readers are all headed for the same goal: learning something new from each other. That’s what makes these conversations so lively, so intense, and so rewarding.

It is striking how frequently the review process in AMS journals becomes a conversation.  It happens so often that it’s the norm, and we sometimes don’t stop to think how extraordinary it is that busy people volunteer their time to contribute so fundamentally to the work of others. Thumbs up, then, for Peer Review Week, for peer review itself, and in particular for the thousands of volunteers who answer the call from editors, day in, day out, to review for AMS journals!