• A project of ASAPbio
    • About
    • Add listing
    • Glossary
    • Blog
    Explore
    Sign in or Register
    Explore

    Publishing review reports (PRR)

    Transparency in peer review and credit to reviewers

    • Share
    • Bookmark
    • Profile
    • Comments 0
    • prev
    • next
    • Website
    • Leave a comment
    • prev
    • next
    In a nutshell

    For detailed article please check or OA article and its supplementary data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-08250-2

    In November 2014, five Elsevier journals agreed to be involved in the Publication of Peer Review reports as articles (from now on, PPR) pilot. During the pilot, these five journals openly published typeset peer review reports with a separate DOI, fully citable and linked to the published article on ScienceDirect. Review reports were published freely available regardless of the journal’s subscription model (two of these journals were open access, while three were published under the subscription-based model). For each accepted article, all revision round review reports were concatenated under the first round for each referee, with all content published as a single review report. Different sections were used in cases of multiple revision rounds. For the sake of simplicity, once agreed to review, referees were not given any opt-out choice and were asked to give their consent to reveal their identity. In agreement with all journal editors, a text was added to the invitation letter to inform referees about the PPR pilot and their options. At the same time, authors themselves were fully informed about the PPR when they submitted their manuscripts. Note that while one of these journals started the pilot earlier in 2012, for all journals the pilot ended in 2017.

    Goals and intentions

    Our aim was to understand whether knowing that their report would be published affected the referees’ willingness to review, the type of recommendations, the turn-around time and the tone of the report. These are all aspects that must be considered when assessing the viability and sustainability of open peer review. By reconstructing the gender and academic status of referees, we also wanted to understand whether these innovations were perceived differently by certain categories of scholars

    Types of outputs
    • Journal accepted manuscripts
    Review process
    • Review requested by
      Authors
    • Reviewer selected by
      Editor, service, or community
    • Public interaction
      No
    • Author response
      Yes
    • Decision
      Binary decision
    Review policy
    • Review coverage
      Complete paper
    • Reviewer identity known to
      Editor or service
    • Competing interests
      Checked
    Social Networks
    • Twitter
    Gallery
    Review features
    • Manuscript hosting
      Yes
    • Review of code or data
      Yes
    • Eligible reviewers/editors
      Editors are appointed for the journals. They choose reviewers and manage the peer review process.
    • Tags or badges
      No
    Transparency
    • Open identities
    • Open reports
    • Single blind
    Results
    • Number of scholarly outputs commented on
      10,000+
    • Metrics
      Yes, article page usage data on Science Direct shows one out of three click on the pilot journal article pages is on the peer review reports. Surveying editors of participating journals shows editors are using published peer review reports as a resource material for training young reviewers.
    • Results summary

      we measured changes both before and during the pilot and found that publishing reports did not significantly compromise referees’ willingness to review, recommendations, or turn-around times. Younger and non-academic scholars were more willing to accept to review and provided more positive and objective recommendations. Male referees tended to write more constructive reports during the pilot. Only 8.1% of referees agreed to reveal their identity in the published report. These findings suggest that open peer review does not compromise the process, at least when referees are able to protect their anonymity.

    • Results URL
      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-08250-2
    mood_bad
  • No comments yet.
  • Add a comment

    Leave a Reply · Cancel reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    Partners

    ReimagineReview is a project of ASAPbio funded by CZI and developed in partnership with Wellcome and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

      

    License

    Except where otherwise noted, text on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license by ASAPbio. Listing data (text and multiple-choice responses) are released under the CC0 public domain waiver. All project and service logos, images, videos, and brands are property of their respective owners and should not be reused without permission, except where otherwise noted.

    Cart

      • Facebook
      • Twitter
      • WhatsApp
      • Telegram
      • LinkedIn
      • Tumblr
      • VKontakte
      • Mail
      • Copy link