The Plant Journal has introduced optional double‐blind peer review

Abstract

One of our goals at the Plant Journal is to serve our authors to the highest possible standard. As a society journal, we are looking hard at how the journal can support the plant sciences community and one of the ways we can do this is to make the process of publishing a paper in TPJ as simple, efficient and fair as possible. We have already made the submission process significantly more flexible, removing formatting requirements for initial submission and have substantially relaxed article-length guidelines. The TPJ Editorial Board and Editorial Office at Wiley work incredibly hard to ensure that fair reviews of manuscripts are obtained in a timely fashion and that clear and well-justified decisions are made. But, we would like to do more. At a meeting of the TPJ Editorial Board in May 2018, we discussed how we could update our peer review process to address biases, unconscious or otherwise. These biases could relate to gender, geographical location of authors, career-stage of authors and many other factors. Biases can be both negative and positive. We discussed the two main alternatives to the traditional single-blind peer review system used by TPJ (where reviewers remain anonymous to authors whilst authors are known to reviewers). These are: double-blind review, where reviewers do not know the identity of authors and vice versa; and open review, where all identities are known and reviews are published alongside the paper. There are pros and cons to each of these systems and it is fair to say that the board was split on this issue. One of the difficulties we faced in making a decision was the lack of evidence as to whether these systems are actually effective in addressing biases. Although a 2008 study claimed that introduction of double-blind review in the journal Behavioural Ecology increased the number of papers by female authors (Budden et al., 2008), the statistical significance of this effect was subsequently disputed (Webb et al., 2008). In the end we decided against open review, our concern being that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. The board was particularly concerned that open review could affect the critical quality of reviews. Indeed, when Nature experimented with open review in 2006, they found that open reviews were not technically substantive. Moreover, take-up by both authors and reviewers was low. Double-blind review is also not without problems – the main one being the difficulty of truly anonymising papers. Nevertheless, when scientists are polled, double-blind review is consistently and overwhelmingly regarded as the most effective peer review system (Mulligan et al., 2013). Journals in the plant sciences have been relatively conservative with respect to their peer-review systems, but some plant journals are now offering double-blind review (e.g. Nature Plants and AoB Plants). We decided that TPJ should also offer double-blind peer review and this has been in place since mid-September. We recognise that some papers will be difficult to anonymise and that not all authors will wish to undertake the additional burden of anonymising manuscripts. Therefore, we are offering double-blind peer review as an option. Authors wishing to take up this option should tick the relevant box during the submission process and ensure that their manuscript file is worded in such a way that their identity is not revealed. Advice as to how to achieve this and full-instructions for double-blind submission are given in the author guidelines online. We will monitor and compare the single-blind and double-blind tracks to assess the take-up of double-blind review and its effect on the gender and geographic origin of submissions and accepted papers. We will report this information back to the community. We will also investigate how we might quantify and compare review quality in the two tracks. We will trial opt-in double blind review for a full year before deciding whether to make it a permanent feature of TPJ peer-review. We will also continue to discuss other avenues and approaches for addressing bias in the peer review process and will commit to implementing anything that is considered both practical and effective. We would welcome comments and discussion from readers by email (lee.sweetlove@plants.ox.ac.uk; fb@msu.edu); Twitter (@leesweetlove; @ThePlantJournal)