Open up: a survey on open and non-anonymized peer reviewing

摘要

Pre-publication peer review of scientific articles is generally considered to be an essential part of ensuring the quality of scholarly research communications [1–3]. It can take many forms from single-round peer review, typical of conferences, to multiple-stage peer reviewing, more common in scholarly journals. Variants of these processes also include zero-blind (neither reviewers nor authors are anonymous), single-blind (reviewers are anonymous), and double-blind (both authors and reviewers are anonymous) systems (see for example [4]). With the major changes currently happening in scholarly communication systems, there is now a strong imperative for those who manage the peer review process to be absolutely clear about their policies and, where possible, upon what evidence such policies are based [5].