December
2023

New publication by SWADA members (Sönmez & Akbaş, 2023)

We are pleased to share that SWADA members has published their articles in an SSCI journal. The article titled ‘Great work folks!’: establishing interpersonal communication in transparent peer reviews of research articles co-authored by Derya Sönmez (Canada) and Dr. Erdem Akbaş (Türkiye) on Transparent Peer Review Genre is published as part of the Digital Genres & Open Science Practices issue with a number of great scholars from the fields, i.e., Ken Hyland, Christine Tardy, Kevin Jiang, Christoph Hafner and many more.

Synopsis of their article: 
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In this study, Sönmez and Akbaş (2023) identified a high frequency & wide variety of politeness strategies in Transparent Peer Review Genre. In TPR, reviewers seemed to ensure that authors are not discouraged from moving on, confirming Gosden’s (2003) argument about the interpersonal role of peer review.

Over 25 years ago, Kourilova (1998) clearly pointed out that 'anonymity' of reviewers was likely to cause potential unbalanced power relations, escalated by the unavailability of the content of reviews for a wider community beyond the editor(s) & the author(s) of a manuscript. The findings of this study, however, are promising in that a great number of politeness strategies were found to have been employed by reviewers not just for establishing a healthier communication with authors but also for sounding more encouraging and constructive.

Thus, if the peer review process faces relative systemic challenges (Allen et al, 2022), bringing 'transparency' via TPRs as adopted by few publishers could remarkably offer systemic solutions & opportunities for the parties involved and reduce the level of unprofessionalism in some reviewer comments..
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Sönmez, D., & Akbaş, E. (2023). ‘Great work folks!’: establishing interpersonal communication in transparent peer reviews of research articles. Iberica (46), 69-96.
https://doi.org/10.17398/2340-2784.46.69

https://revistaiberica.org/index.php/iberica/issue/view/55