Correspondence: Michael Willis, John Wiley & Sons, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, United Kingdom. Email: miwillis@wiley.com.

Key points

Introduction

Every innovation starts with a key problem or question to solve. Our starting point was a question from a Wiley colleague: What does gold standard peer review look like? This led to other questions: How can a journal team (comprising academic editors, managing editors and publishers) really know whether the peer review ‘service’ they deliver to researchers is as good as that delivered by others? How can they identify their strengths and address their weaknesses? How can they differentiate in ways that really matter to researchers?
To answer these questions a team of colleagues began by reviewing literature on the topic and collecting and analysing 40 case studies in peer review. The cases were submitted by a range of managing editors, academic editors and publishers employed by or working with Wiley spanning different disciplinary areas and geographical regions. The team identified hallmarks of better peer review and defined five ‘Essential Areas’ – integrity, ethics, fairness, usefulness and timeliness (Table 1).