International Energy Agency maintains ‘gold standard’ in energy market analysis
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is an international organization established in the 1970s
Its goal is to promote reliable, clean, affordable energy for its 29 member countries, as well as associate countries around the world.
The IEA produces a wide variety of analytical publications and has a strong reputation for analytical excellence.
Its flagship publication is the World Energy Outlook (WEO), a reference for the energy industry that looks at the outlook for global energy to 2040.
The WEO represents the gold standard in energy market analysis and its accuracy and currency are critical to achieving the agency’s goal.
Preparing the annual WEO involves an extensive peer review process in which staff send a draft analysis to leading energy experts around the world.
We receive about 1200 comments for the draft report and PleaseReview’s final report lets us see all the consolidated comments in less than a minute. We save a lot of time in using PleaseReview. The benefits to us have been immediate.
The IEA’s challenge
Before PleaseReview, this was a laborious manual process that required individual mailings to around 400 people.
Reviewers would send comments in different formats which made considering them for incorporation both difficult and time consuming.
Each submission had to be considered separately, with each referring in different ways to different parts of the text.
This made it difficult to track submissions and to consider them in a consolidated way, as well as to compare the responses of different reviewers to individual parts of the text.
At the end of the process, staff had only a few weeks to collate, review and incorporate comments and changes before the WEO went to print.
Tim Gould is the IEA’s Head of Division and is responsible for the WEO:
‘We had to make sure that our peer review process and our interaction with a wide range of stakeholders could be managed efficiently at the highest level with all the necessary safeguards.
‘We’re always looking for ways to improve the process and streamline where possible, so in 2014 we decided to move across to PleaseReview for our peer review.’
We can also download the comments by reviewer so that we can select those that are important and that should go to the director first, as well as look at the comments for a specific part of the chapter to pick out what we really want to see.
IEA's key benefits
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Allows systematic and methodical review of a draft text and due consideration of all input
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Helps distribute different parts of the text to different constituencies efficiently
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Consolidates communication with reviewers and improves effectiveness of communication
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Releases more time to work through comments at the end of the peer review process
How does PleaseReview help the IEA to maintain the ‘gold standard’?
Zakia Adam works as a Research Assistant within the World Energy Outlook team:‘For every report, we put all the documents on PleaseReview and gave the reviewers access to add their comments.
This has been the easiest way for us to collect all the comments in a structured way, enabling the different authors review the comments that we’ve received.
‘Once we close the review we can easily download all the comments in a few clicks which has saved us a lot of time.
‘We can also download the comments by reviewer so that we can select those that are important and that should go to the director first, as well as look at the comments for a specific part of the chapter to pick out what we really want to see.’
Since starting to use the software in 2014 for the WEO, PleaseReview has become the platform of choice for many of the agency’s analytical publications, with other parts of the IEA now using PleaseReview for the peer review of their own analyses.
One of these publications is the IEA’s Renewable Energy Market Report, which includes a forecast for several renewable energy technologies for the next five years and for which the IEA started using PleaseReview in 2015.
Hemyi Bahar, Renewable Energy Markets Analyst and Report Project Manager, explains: ‘We definitely have more control now and can keep track of comments more efficiently. PleaseReview keeps an audit trail of every report, including comments from all reviewers and whether or not they have been accepted or rejected.
‘The reporting system is a significant help to us in going through all the comments chronologically and seeing if and how they’ve been addressed.
We receive about 1200 comments for the draft report and PleaseReview’s final report lets us see all the consolidated comments in less than a minute.
‘We save a lot of time in using PleaseReview. The benefits to us have been immediate
For five staff, it probably saves about three full days to use PleaseReview instead of the traditional method that we were using, which is time that can now be used differently.’
Tim, IEA’s Head of Division, concludes: ‘We have a very well-functioning system of working with PleaseReview for our draft analysis. We’re confident that PleaseReview is a big part of allowing us to make sure that our peer review process is managed efficiently at the highest level and with all the necessary safeguards.’
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