Peer Review Operations Specialist

As a Peer Review Operations Specialist, you are a confident and highly organized self-starter, motivated by a culture of continuous improvement. You’re an excellent communicator and a natural team player, with the ability to collaborate effectively across teams and hold yourself accountable for meeting competing deadlines in a fast-paced environment.

Reporting to the Peer Review Operations Manager, you work as a member of the Peer Review Operations team to maintain efficient peer review workflows, ensure high vendor performance standards, and uphold excellent contributor experience for authors, editors, and reviewers. You will enforce turnaround time benchmarks for all peer review milestones to protect process integrity and ensure timeliness and quality of publication.

Responsibilities

Submission Management

• Ensure the timely, efficient peer review of all submissions
• Ensure that queries or concerns escalated by vendors, Customer Care or other PLOS colleagues are addressed and resolved professionally and within required timelines, or escalated appropriately
• Identify and remove barriers to submission, working collaboratively with colleagues across PLOS as required
• Proactively identify workflow inefficiencies, variations or backlogs to diagnose persistent issues
• Ensure that manuscripts meet requirements and follow current policies and procedures

Workflows

• Troubleshoot persistent manuscript, workflow or system issues, providing expertise and advice, and exercising judgment to resolve the issue or escalate to the Peer Review Operations Manager or other colleagues as appropriate
• Proactively raise data-driven recommendations for continuous journal operations and workflow improvements to the Peer Review Operations Manager
• Ensure standard journal workflows are maintained as established, implementing and adopting process updates when approved by the Peer Review Operations Manager

Projects

• Contribute to workflow project and initiate proposals as requested, and undertake operations projects and initiatives as directed by the Peer Review Operations Manager
• Serve as daily liaison with vendor representatives, monitoring quality and timeliness performance against target thresholds and KPIs

Other

• Contribute to other operational research outputs related to PLOS’s mission where required, so that our journal workflows are optimized to encourage scientific openness and transparency

Knowledge and Skills

Essential

• Prior experience in peer-reviewed scholarly publishing
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, both written and oral
• Growth mindset with a collaborative, team player mentality
• An ability to maintain a positive and professional customer service attitude
• Able to work constructively with vendors, authors, editors, customers, and colleagues from a range of international settings
• Knowledge of Excel, Word, file types and file conversions
• Able to work under tight deadlines whilst achieving a high standard of quality and accuracy
• Able to set priorities and work independently
• Upholds high standards of professionalism in the workplace
• Embraces change with a positive attitude
• An interest in science and in advancing scientific knowledge

Desirable

• Knowledge of and expertise with peer review and manuscript management database systems; proficiency with Editorial Manager a plus
• Knowledge of customer relationship management (CRM) software such as Salesforce
• Awareness of and commitment to open science

Physical Requirements and Work Environment

• Prolonged periods stationary at a desk and working on a computer.
• Some domestic and international travel required.

Qualifications

• A university degree or equivalent experience