For Peer Review week, the BES Publications Team are discussing about various aspects of peer review, and how we make the process more transparent. Yesterday, methods.blog launched their new Peer Reviewer Mentoring Scheme, but the Publications Team have a number of other ways of opening up peer review and helping people get the most out of their published paper.

Across the BES journals, the editorial staff see over 4,500 papers a year, many of them multiple times. Getting those papers through peer review is a job that starts long before a paper is submitted, and doesn’t end after the first –or even the final- decision.

From our side of the desk, everyone benefits from knowing more about how peer review and publishing works, and how to get the most out of your paper after it’s published. We produce the trusty BES Guides (the very first of which was on Peer Review in Ecology and Evolution) and we run regular workshops and panels at the annual meeting—but if you can’t make it to those, the Publications team has also run 7 workshops (and counting) on publishing in 5 countries— and for audiences that ranged from undergrads to senior researchers. Some workshops have been at conferences or meetings, but not all (in March, we gave a lunchtime workshop for post-grads at Swansea University, at the request of Methods and Journal of Animal Ecology Associate Editor, Luca  Börger,.) Last year, we also ran a webinar on How to Get Published (you can see a recording of that here).

These workshops covered general aspects of publishing, useful for students and early career researchers –how peer review works, why publish, what those decisions actually mean (and what you should do after getting one)- and some had more specific advice, useful whatever your career stage –promoting your research, ethical issues in publishing, SEO and jargon-busting- but we’re always eager to hear from the community on what other topics we could cover. What did you wish had been covered more before you submitted your first paper? What mistakes could you have avoided if you’d had a little more advice? What do you wish your supervisor had told you—and what do you want your students to know now?

If you have any ideas for other workshops we could do – or if you’d like us to run a workshop for you – you can email us here.

Jennifer Meyer is the Assistant Editor for Functional Ecology