We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Jose M. Mulet Salort has been awarded the Plants Outstanding Reviewer Award for 2025. This award recognizes reviewers who display thoroughness, professionalism, and timeliness in their contributions to the reviewing process.

Prof. Dr. Jose M. Mulet Salort graduated in chemistry and received a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of Valencia, Spain, under the supervision of Prof. Ramon Serrano. Three-year postdoctoral stage at the University of Basel (Switzerland) investigating cell and molecular biology in the group of Prof. Michael N. Hall. He currently works as a full professor of biotechnology at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV). He leads a laboratory at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Plants (IBMCP), a joint center of the Spanish Science Council (CSIC) and the UPV, where he is developing crop plants tolerant to climate change and novel biostimulants, and investigating the regulation of potassium fluxes in guard cells. He is also vice director of the IBMCP. In parallel with his academic and research work, he engages in a wide range of activities as a scientific communicator and is very active in the GMO/organic debate. He has served as a scientific advisor on several expert panels in the European Union for the regulation of CRISPR and new genomic techniques (NGT). He has served as a scientific advisor on topics such as food and nutrition, agriculture, vaccination, and GMO/NGT for the governments of México, Colombia, Argentina, and Perú. He is the author of the book “Eat without Fear” that has sold more than 20,000 copies and has been published in several countries, “Science in the Shadow”, “GMO without fear”, “Real environmentalism”, and some others. He is also the author of the blog “Tomatoes with genes” (jmmulet.naukas.com). He writes the Section “Science without Fiction” in “El País Semanal”, the most read newspaper in Spain, and “Science stills” in the popular science journal Metode. Regular speaker on topics related to food, science myths, pseudomedicine, or biotechnology. His Twitter account, with more than 73.000 followers, is one of the most popular among active Spanish-speaking scientists (@jmmulet). His latest book is “We Eat What We Are”.

The following is an interview with Prof. Dr. Jose M. Mulet Salort:

1. We hope that the Outstanding Reviewer Award will open new opportunities for you. How does an award like this help to support the career of a researcher such as yourself?
An award always gives visibility. Letting people know what your research is about is always beneficial because it can lead to more opportunities for collaboration.

2. How do you balance the comprehensiveness and efficiency of review? Can you share some specific methods or principles for reviewing?
I always try to do a fair review. It is really a pity when you see a paper with a substantial amount of work, but essential controls are missing, or the experimental design is poor, so it cannot be accepted.  Or when the authors write a standard narrative discussion that redundantly repeats the results Section, forgetting to highlight the main findings of their own work and failing to give the relevance it deserves.
When I review a paper, I usually start with the figures and figure legends. This is the first checkpoint. Improper statistics, poor descriptions in the figure legends, or any incoherence may stop the review at this point. Many authors fail to provide essential information that should be in the figure legend, such as which statistical analyses they performed, at what threshold, or the sample size (n). If I have any doubt about how the experiments were performed, I go to the methods section to see whether the information is sufficiently detailed to understand what the authors did. If not, the review stops here. Once I consider that the figures are of enough quality and the methods are well described, I start reading the paper.    

3. In your view, what characteristics typically define a high-quality peer review report? In other words, in your opinion, what are the most critical criteria you adhere to when evaluating manuscripts?
The most important aspect is fairness for readers and authors. If you accept the paper, you should explain its strengths and its interest to the journal’s readers. If you reject the paper, you should explain to the authors why you think the quality is not sufficient for publication and make clear, realistic suggestions for improvement. As an author, I hate receiving arrogant style, single-line reviews, like “your paper is bad” without further explanations, or “you are not good enough, or famous enough for this journal”, so as a reviewer, I try to be fair and clear in any decision and always be respectful with the authors.

4. What could journals do to support reviewers better and strengthen the review process?
Incentivize them. Reviewing papers is time-consuming, non-profit work. Reviewing papers is not included on your CV, and you are not paid for it. Usually, it is pro bono work in which the benefit accrues to the editorial rather than to the scientist who is providing their time, knowledge, and expertise. Properly incentivizing the scientists who serve as reviewers would be fairer to all participants in the system and would likely speed up the review process.

5. How do you think young scholars can improve the quality of their papers and better pass the peer review process?
Read a lot of papers. Any published paper is a paper that has successfully been through a peer review process. Once you have your manuscript, compare it with published manuscripts on the topic and judge if the amount of novel data, the quality of presentation, and the interest for the readers is similar, or better, than those papers already published. Another point is that many young scholars usually fail in formal aspects. For instance, not using the same criteria among figures, use of laboratory jargon in the text or methods sections that look like a copy-paste from the laboratory’s protocol book. This is usually the consequence of not reading papers, so you are not familiar with the formal aspects of scientific writing.

6. As an outstanding reviewer in our journal, what encouragement and expectations would you like to send to authors and young researchers in this field?
Keep working hard and make time to read more papers. It’s great training, and you will find ideas for your own experiments.