Dr. Bahar Mehmani is Reviewer Experience Lead in the Global Publishing Development department at Elsevier. Her focus is to improve peer review process and workflow across all Elsevier journals to make peer review process a seamless, informative and pleasant process both for reviewers and editors as well as authors. She launched Elsevier Reviewer Recognition Program in early 2014 with the aim of recognizing reviewers voluntary contribution to the progress of science. She is also working on adding further transparency to the peer review process. Examples are publishing peer review reports (signed or anonymous) with DOIs for both giving credit to reviewers and providing more information to readers. In that regards, she is also working on publishing total number of reviewers as well as name of the handling editors on article pages on Science Direct. Another area she is working on is to improve quality of peer review by introducing quality measures such as editor, author and reviewer surveys or using versions of RQI. Another initiative she is involved with is gender bias in peer review.

Bahar is a member of PEERE and as the representative of Elsevier is collaborating with researcher members of the group in running a scientific study on peer review. She is also chair of one of three organizing committees of the annual peer review week (link)

 

Bahar joined Elsevier as a managing editor in 2012. She was responsible for checking submitted manuscripts for one physics and two mathematics titles. In her role as Managing editor she also worked on expanding journals’ aims and scopes and launched a new journal (link). Before joining Elsevier, she was a postdoc researcher at Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL). She received her PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 2010.

Conflict of interest declaration