Abstract
Open peer review (OPR), where review reports and reviewers’ identities are published alongside the articles, represents one of the last aspects of the open science movement to be widely embraced, although its adoption has been growing since the turn of the century. This study provides the first comprehensive investigation of OPR adoption, its early adopters and the implementation approaches used. Current bibliographic databases do not systematically index OPR journals, nor do the OPR journals clearly state their policies on open identities and open reports. Using various methods, we identified 617 OPR journals that published at least one article with open identities or open reports as of 2019 and analyzed their wide-ranging implementations to derive emerging OPR practices. The findings suggest that: (1) there has been a steady growth in OPR adoption since 2001, when 38 journals initially adopted OPR, with more rapid growth since 2017; (2) OPR adoption is most prevalent in medical and scientific disciplines (79.9%); (3) five publishers are responsible for 81% of the identified OPR journals; (4) early adopter publishers have implemented OPR in different ways, resulting in different levels of transparency. Across the variations in OPR implementations, two important factors define the degree of transparency: open identities and open reports. Open identities may include reviewer names and affiliation as well as credentials; open reports may include timestamped review histories consisting of referee reports and author rebuttals or a letter from the editor integrating reviewers’ comments. When and where open reports can be accessed are also important factors indicating the OPR transparency level. Publishers of optional OPR journals should add metric data in their annual status reports.
Highlights
Peer1 review represents one of the foundations of modern scholarly communication
We searched newsletters and lists related to peer review, from which we identified Open peer review (OPR) adoption, for example, from PLOS in 2019
The journals were classified into six broad topical areas using a modified form of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) classification scheme to determine which disciplinary areas have adopted OPR
Summary
Peer review represents one of the foundations of modern scholarly communication. The scrutiny of peers to assess the merits of research and to provide recommendations for whether research exhibits sufficient rigor and novelty to warrant publication is intended to reduce the risk of publishing research that is sloppy, erroneous or, at worst, fabricated. Peer review uses forms of blinded review where parties involved remain anonymous to reduce bias in the evaluation process. The most extensive form of blinded review, triple blind, anonymizes the process so that the author(s), reviewer(s) and the handling editor(s) are not aware of each other’s identities. A more common implementation is double blind peer review, where the author(s) and reviewer(s) are not aware of each other’s identities. Authors must remove all content that might identify them to any reviewer. Single blind review is commonly practiced, where reviewers are aware of the identities of the authors, but the authors do not know who has reviewed their manuscript. Blinding of reviewer identities may allow reviewers to use their anonymity to deliver more critical reviews or to write reviews that lack rigor because authors and readers will not know who the reviewers are. On the other hand, requiring reviewers to identify themselves may encourage greater accountability or could cause reviewers to blunt their criticisms (van Rooyen et al 1999)
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