figshare help

Reviewing items

Reviewing is the act of approving or rejecting an item, with feedback, before it becomes publicly available. You can turn on reviewing in the Administration page by selecting the group you want reviewing turned on in (groups inherit reviewing so if you turn it on at the top level, all subgroups will have reviewing turned on, as well), selecting Configure, and scrolling down to Administration. There, you will have the option to turn on reviewing.

How to approve or reject an item

All reviewing requests can be found in the reviewing pool from the reviewer account. All reviewers set either at the group level or institution level will receive both email notifications and will also have them listed in the reviewing pool. If you would like to receive reviewing requests for every subgroup at your institution, you will need to add yourself as a reviewer to each subgroup or you can simply set yourself as institutional reviewer. While you won't be displayed as a reviewer on every Edit group page, you will be an implicit reviewer there and you will receive all the requests.

If the user creates the item in My data, then the review request will go to the group the user is assigned to. If the user creates the item in a group project, then the reviewing request is sent to that group.

Please note: when creating items in projects, it is important to remember that reviewing is connected at group level, so depending on the group you select to link the project to might or might not have reviewing turned on.

To view items for review, click on the dropdown menu and select Review requests.

You will then see all review requests that are open, whether they’ve been assigned to you or not. You can opt to view only your assigned requests and sort by newest or oldest first. The number you see in the menu displays unassigned, open requests. The number might be different to what you see when you enter the pool. By default, the pool shows all the requests even if they are assigned already, filtered by the group(s) you can review. If you know there are open review requests but you cannot see them, it means they must be assigned to groups that you cannot review.

To process an item through review, select the item and assign it to yourself as the reviewer. The image below shows a situation where you are an institutional reviewer. As an institutional reviewer, you can assign the request to yourself but also to other reviewers that are assigned to the same group of the request. If you are a group reviewer, you can only assign the request to yourself.

Once an item is assigned to you, you can edit in situ, impersonate the author, write a review, email the author, reject and decline from the reviewer area.


If there is mandatory metadata missing or if you simply want to change some of the metadata, please use the Save button from the Edit item tab before approving. If you do not save the changes, you will approve the previous version.

You can filter items in the review interface based on whether they’re under review or have been approved, rejected, or archived. Just click Status in the top right and select the statuses you wish to apply. You can also add additional filters like reviewer and date created. You can also collapse filters after searching for them.

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