Abstract
Surveys indicate that researchers generally have a positive attitude towards open peer review when this consists of making reviews available alongside published articles. Researchers are more negative about revealing the identity of reviewers. They worry reviewers will be less likely to express criticism if their identity is known to authors. Experiments suggest that reviewers are somewhat less likely to recommend rejection when they are told their identity will be communicated to authors, than when they will remain anonymous. One recent study revealed reviewers in five journals who voluntarily signed their reviews gave more positive recommendations than those who did not sign their reviews. We replicate and extend this finding by analyzing 12010 open reviews in PeerJ and 4188 reviews in the Royal Society Open Science where authors can voluntarily sign their reviews. These results based on behavioral data from real peer reviews across a wide range of scientific disciplines demonstrate convincingly that reviewers’ decision to sign is related to their recommendation. The proportion of signed reviews was higher for more positive recommendations, than for more negative recommendations. We also share all 23649 text-mined reviews as raw data underlying our results that can be re-used by researchers interested in peer review.
Highlights
Surveys indicate that researchers generally have a positive attitude towards open peer review when this consists of making reviews available alongside published articles
We examined the relationship between the recommendations peer reviewers made and the proportion of signed reviews in two large open access journals, PeerJ and Royal Society Open journals (Royal Society Open Science and Royal Society Open Biology)
We examined 8155 articles published in PeerJ (7930 in PeerJ, 225 in PeerJ Computer Science), as well as 3576 articles from Royal Society Open journals (2887 from Royal Society Open Science (RSOS), 689 from Royal Society Open Biology (RSOB), 81 of which were editorials or errata without reviews) published up to October 2019
Summary
Surveys indicate that researchers generally have a positive attitude towards open peer review when this consists of making reviews available alongside published articles. PeerJ and Royal Society Open journals publish articles across a wide range of scientific disciplines, including biology, chemistry, engineering, life sciences, mathematics, and medicine, allowing us to replicate and extend the analysis by Bravo and colleagues (2019).
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