Peer Reviewer: Role, Ethics & How-To

“Peer reviewer” and “peer review” get used almost interchangeably, but they’re different questions. CASRAI’s Peer Review guide covers the process — why it exists, its stages, its outcomes, its limitations. This page covers the person doing it: what it actually means to take on the reviewer role, how someone becomes one, what standards bodies expect of you once you agree, and how that work gets recognized. If you’re an author or editor looking for the process overview, start there instead — this page assumes you’re either reviewing already or considering it.

What a peer reviewer is — and isn’t

A peer reviewer is a subject-matter expert asked by a journal, funder, conference, or publishing platform to independently assess the validity, originality, significance, and clarity of a submission — a manuscript, grant application, conference paper, registered report, or dataset — and report back to whoever will make the accept/revise/reject decision. Three distinctions matter operationally:

Reviewer vs. editor. Reviewers advise; editors decide. Per ICMJE’s Responsibilities in the Submission and Peer-Review Process, a peer-reviewed journal is under no obligation to follow reviewer recommendations — the editor makes the final call and can diverge from what reviewers advised in either direction.
Reviewer vs. author. Reviewing a manuscript is not authorship, and the two carry different obligations — see CASRAI’s Peer reviewer contribution entry for how the two are distinguished for credit purposes.
Reviewer role, not one fixed job. “Reviewer” covers several distinct activities — manuscript peer reviewer, grant/funding reviewer, conference programme-committee reviewer, data or software reproducibility reviewer. CASRAI’s Reviewer role typology entry is the controlled vocabulary for telling these apart, which matters once you get to how the work is credited, below.

How to become a peer reviewer

There’s no single certifying body or universal application process — becoming a reviewer is journal-, funder-, or platform-specific — but the routes that actually work are consistent across the field:

Get invited by an editor. The most common route. Editors typically identify potential reviewers from a manuscript’s own reference list, from an existing reviewer database, or by recommendation from another reviewer or author. Publishing corresponding-author papers in a field is the single biggest driver of getting asked to review in that field.
Volunteer directly with a journal. Many journals maintain a self-nomination form or reviewer database (their websites’ “become a reviewer” or “reviewer resources” pages) where you can list your expertise areas.
Co-review with a mentor. The COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers explicitly endorse this as a training route: a supervisor can involve a student or junior researcher in a review with the editor’s permission, provided the student is credited as reviewer of record alongside the mentor. It’s the standard on-ramp for early-career researchers.
Take a structured training course. Two real, currently available examples: Elsevier Researcher Academy’s Certified Peer Reviewer Course and the Web of Science Academy’s peer review course for early-career researchers, which pairs module completion with a mentor-endorsed practice review.

COPE frames taking up the reviewer role as a professional responsibility that flows from having benefited from peer review as an author, not an entitlement or a job posting — and its guidelines are explicit that you should only agree once you can verify you have the specific subject expertise the manuscript needs, flagging any gaps in your expertise clearly rather than agreeing anyway.

What’s expected of you once you agree: COPE’s Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers

The operative reference for reviewer conduct is the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers (COPE Council, version 2, published September 2017, updating a 2013 original). It organizes reviewer obligations across the lifecycle of a single review:

Before you agree to review

Only agree if you have the necessary subject expertise and can be unbiased — say so clearly if you can only assess part of a manuscript.
Declare all potential competing interests (personal, financial, intellectual, professional, political, or religious) before accepting. COPE’s guidelines specifically say you should not agree to review if you’re currently at the same institution as an author, or have been a mentor, mentee, close collaborator, or joint grant holder with an author within roughly the past three years.
Only commit to a timeframe you can actually meet, and tell the journal promptly if that changes.

While you’re reviewing

Keep the manuscript and your review confidential, and never use information from it for your own or anyone else’s advantage.
Don’t involve anyone else in the review — including a junior researcher you’re mentoring — without the editor’s permission, and credit anyone who did help.
Stay unbiased with respect to an author’s nationality, beliefs, gender, or institutional origin, and don’t let commercial considerations influence your assessment.
If you notice possible misconduct, plagiarism, or a manuscript substantially similar to something already published or under review elsewhere, tell the editor directly — COPE is explicit that reviewers should not personally investigate further.

When you write your report

Be objective and constructive; substantiate criticism with specific evidence rather than general assertions.
Keep confidential comments to the editor consistent with what you tell the authors — COPE’s guidelines specifically warn against using editor-only comments as a place for accusations the authors never see.
Don’t suggest authors cite your own work (or an associate’s) without a genuine academic reason — a real and specifically named form of reviewer misconduct in COPE’s guidelines, distinct from plagiarism or fabrication.

After the review closes

Continue to treat the manuscript as confidential — COPE’s guidelines don’t have an expiry date on this obligation.
Where practical, take on revisions or resubmissions of a manuscript you’ve already reviewed, since you already have the context.

ICMJE’s own Responsibilities in the Submission and Peer-Review Process guidance is consistent with COPE on the core points — confidentiality, prompt and constructive response, and disclosing competing interests — and adds that reviewers must not use an unpublished manuscript’s ideas or data for their own purposes before it’s published.

Is peer review a paid role?

Mostly no, and it’s worth being direct about this rather than letting “peer reviewer jobs” searches assume otherwise. Journal manuscript review is, by convention across the scholarly publishing field, unpaid volunteer service — reviewers do it as part of professional participation in their field, not as compensated work. There isn’t a general “peer reviewer salary.”

Grant and funding peer review is a partial exception: some funders pay a modest honorarium to reviewers who sit on evaluation panels. The NIH Center for Scientific Review, for example, pays study-section reviewers a per-day honorarium tied to the number of written critiques submitted, alongside travel reimbursement — NIH itself is explicit that this doesn’t compensate reviewers for their time or the service they provide, it’s a reimbursement mechanism, not a wage. This is specific to funding/grant review panels, not the norm for journal manuscript reviewing.

How reviewer contributions get recognized

Because journal review is usually unpaid and traditionally anonymous, recognition infrastructure has become the main mechanism for reviewers to get credit for the work at all. Two pieces matter:

ORCID’s Peer Review section. Per ORCID’s own integration documentation, peer review entries in an ORCID record can only be added by a trusted organization via the ORCID API — a researcher cannot self-enter a review credit the way they can self-enter a work or an employment record. In practice this means the journal, publisher, funder, or a recognition service acting on their behalf requests your iD during the review and, with your permission, pushes a verified review record to your ORCID profile once it’s complete.
Web of Science Reviewer Recognition Service (formerly Publons). A third-party recognition service that works with review organizers to log and verify review activity, and can be set to automatically export a reviewer’s verified review history to their ORCID record.

CASRAI’s own Peer reviewer contribution dictionary term covers what counts as a creditable review for this purpose (a formal review for a journal, funder, or conference — not informally reading a colleague’s draft). Where an ORCID record shows reviews broken out by type (manuscript review vs. grant review vs. reproducibility review, for example), that’s the Reviewer role typology at work — a controlled vocabulary for giving differentiated credit rather than a single undifferentiated review count.

Peer reviewer vs. related roles

“Reviewer” is not one job description. A manuscript peer reviewer, a grant/funding panel reviewer, a conference programme-committee member, and a reproducibility reviewer (someone specifically checking whether code or data reproduces a paper’s results) are all reviewer roles with different scope, different confidentiality norms, and different recognition pathways — see Reviewer role typology for how CASRAI’s vocabulary distinguishes them, and Reproducibility reviewer for the reproducibility-specific case. The identity-disclosure question — whether you and the author know each other’s names — is a separate axis again; see CASRAI’s comparison of single-blind, double-blind, and open peer review for that distinction, and the ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023 Peer Review Terminology Standard for the formal vocabulary underlying it.

A worked example

Illustrative walkthrough, not a real review or a specific named case: A researcher publishes a paper in a mid-sized journal. Six months later, an editor at that same journal — recognizing the researcher’s expertise from the reference list of a new submission — emails asking if they’d review it, with a two-week deadline and a link to the manuscript and the journal’s reviewer guidelines. The researcher checks for competing interests (no shared institution or recent collaboration with the authors), confirms they can meet the deadline, and accepts. They read the manuscript and supplementary materials, write a structured report following the journal’s template, keep their confidential comments to the editor consistent with what they tell the authors, and submit before the deadline. Afterward, the journal — with the researcher’s prior permission — pushes a verified peer review record to their ORCID profile via the ORCID API, and the review remains confidential indefinitely.

Common questions

What is peer review and why is it important?

See CASRAI’s Peer Review guide for the full process-level answer — purpose, stages, and known limitations. In short: it’s independent expert scrutiny before (or after) publication, meant to catch errors and signal credibility, though it’s not infallible and CASRAI’s guide covers those limitations honestly.

What is the peer review process, step by step?

Covered in detail in the Peer Review guide‘s process walkthrough. This page focuses specifically on the reviewer’s own role within that process, not the process itself.

How do I become a peer reviewer for a specific journal (Elsevier, Springer, etc.)?

Each publisher and journal runs its own reviewer sign-up and invitation process, and those specifics change and vary by title — check the individual journal’s “reviewers” or “editorial policies” page directly rather than relying on generic guidance. The general routes above (editor invitation, self-nomination, mentored co-review, structured training) apply across virtually all of them.

Do peer reviewers get paid?

Journal manuscript review is normally unpaid volunteer service. Grant/funding review panels are a partial exception — some funders, including NIH, pay reviewers a modest per-day honorarium plus travel reimbursement, but this is specific to funding review, not journal peer review generally.

Can I list peer review on my CV or ORCID profile?

Yes — that’s precisely what ORCID’s Peer Review record and services like Web of Science Reviewer Recognition exist for. See “How reviewer contributions get recognized” above.

Peer Reviewer: Role, Responsibilities, and How to Become One