Original title: The effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals
Peer reviewA process in which experts assess a paper before a journal decides whether to publish it. is when experts assess a paper before a journal publishes it. In a pilot across five journals, researchers compared refereeAn expert asked to review a submitted paper. behavior before and during the practice of publishing review reports. They found no significant change in referees’ willingness to review, recommendations, or response times. Only a small share agreed to reveal their names, so the results apply to a system where referees could remain anonymous.
Imagine a teacher asking students to check one another’s work before it is handed in. Some students may worry that their comments will be shown to everyone, so they might stop helping or take longer. In this paper, the students are referees and their comments are review reports; making those reports public did not significantly change key parts of the process when referees could keep their names private.
Journals considering public review reports need to know whether transparency could make experts less willing to review or slow publication. In these five journals, the measured parts of the process showed no significant compromise when referees could keep their identities private.
The findings cover a pilot in five Elsevier journals and do not establish that the same effects hold in other journals or settings. Because referees could protect their anonymity and only 8.1% agreed to reveal their identity, the results do not establish how publishing reports would affect a process that requires named reviewers.
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The effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals — Giangiacomo Bravo, Francisco Grimaldo, Emilia López-Iñesta et al. — Nature Communications — doi:10.1038/s41467-018-08250-2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.