The peer-review gap
CRediT does not yet include a peer-review role. The interim recognition pathways — Web of Science Reviewer Recognition, ORCID, Crossref and open-peer-review journals — each cover a piece of the gap.
CRediT’s fourteen roles cover the contributions made to a published research output by its named authors. Peer review is a contribution to the published version of an article — reviewers frequently shape methodology, catch errors and prompt analyses that end up in the final paper — but it is not a contribution by an author. The current taxonomy therefore does not surface it.
The NISO CRediT Standing Committee has discussed adding a peer-review role with NISO’s peer-review track (notably during Peer Review Week activities). The argument for adding it is that peer review is substantive contribution and under-recognised work; the argument against is that extending CRediT to non-author contributors opens a much wider question about acknowledged contributors (medical writers, statisticians, laboratory technicians) that is not yet resolved. No formal extension has been adopted as of 2026.
Until a CRediT peer-review role is adopted, four complementary infrastructures carry the recognition work. Each does part of the job; together they cover the major use cases.
Recognition infrastructure
The successor to Publons. Integrates with major submission systems and ORCID; reviewers can opt in to having verified peer-review activity recorded on their researcher profile. Used across Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier and many society publishers.
Recognition infrastructure
ORCID supports peer-review activity as a first-class record type, deposited by the publisher or the journal directly to the reviewer's ORCID iD. The record carries the journal, review type, subject area and the role (reviewer, editor, organiser) without revealing the manuscript itself, preserving the confidentiality of single- and double-anonymous review.
Recognition infrastructure
Crossref accepts peer-review reports as a first-class content type via its content-registration API. Open-peer-review journals (eLife, F1000Research, the BMC open-peer journals) deposit reviews with DOIs of their own, making them citable artefacts in the published record.
Recognition infrastructure
Fully open peer review: review reports are published with DOIs alongside the article, reviewers are named, and the review history is part of the citable record. Used as the operational model for the wider open-peer-review movement.
For publishers seeking to recognise peer-review contribution today, the operational recommendation is to implement both ORCID peer-review deposit and Web of Science Reviewer Recognition through the submission system. The two together cover the reviewer-facing profile use case (Web of Science Reviewer Recognition gives the reviewer a public profile of verified activity) and the citation-graph use case (ORCID makes the activity a first-class record that other systems can ingest). Where the journal’s editorial model supports open peer review, deposit the review reports to Crossref so that they become citable artefacts in their own right.
For reviewers, the parallel author-facing recommendation is on the persistent identifiers page: maintain an ORCID iD, opt in to peer-review record deposit, and ensure your institutional CRIS ingests peer-review activity alongside publications.
