Advancing Transparency in Academic Publishing: The Growing Adoption of Open Peer Review Practices
Exploring how visible review processes benefit authors, reviewers, and the wider research community
Peer reviewers are essential to scholarly publishing. Their expert feedback provides validation of the research and helps authors improve their academic work. However, this crucial step in publishing research is all too often inaccessible to readers and the reviewers’ work often goes unrecognised.
There has been a growing uptake of open peer review practices that aim to improve transparency in this vital stage of the publishing process. It’s great news to see that the Nature portfolio of journals has joined this movement and will soon be publishing peer review files for all newly submitted research articles that go on to be published. This is a significant step forward which showcases that scholarly publishers are increasingly recognising the myriad benefits of open peer review and are taking steps to meet researchers’ growing demand for transparency in the peer review process.
Nature’s announcement is one of the most recent in a series of open peer review initiatives launched over the past few years. For example, Taylor & Francis recently announced a similar open peer review trial for the European Journal of Higher Education, with peer review reports being included alongside the articles from April 2023. Many other journals now publish the review history of a manuscript, either at the author’s choice (e.g. PeerJ or the PLOS family of journals) or for all published articles (e.g. BMJ Open and many BMC Medicine titles).
As publishers begin to introduce more transparency in their peer review processes, authors are increasingly using preprints to disseminate their research. The rise of preprints has precipitated a wider discussion of post-publication peer review models in scholarly publishing, often called “publish-review-curate”, and several initiatives providing open peer review of preprints have launched. For example, PREreview facilitates open peer review of preprints with a focus on supporting and empowering underserved and historically excluded communities of researchers. Other publishing venues are also embracing open peer review of articles after they are published, such as the life sciences journal, eLife, and metascience publishing platform, MetaROR. Preprint servers are also developing tools to allow for open peer review, such as bioRxiv and medRxiv allowing journals and review services to post peer reviews on the preprints or VeriXiv offering a fully open and transparent peer review process for authors who opt into reviewing their preprint on the platform.
While the peer reviews are made public, which is a fantastic step forward, many of these initiatives do not require reviewers to openly identify themselves.
At F1000, we have embraced a fully open and transparent peer review model for over a decade. All F1000 platforms publish the full peer review reports, with names and affiliations of the peer reviewers alongside the article. Each peer review report is assigned a DOI, so the review is citable in its own right, and reviewers can link their profile to ORCID to receive credit for their reviews. The full author response is also published, so the whole peer review and revision history for a published article is openly available for everyone to read.
Our experience to date has shown the broad benefits of these open peer review practices to researchers and wider society. Authors benefit from more constructive and collaborative discussions with reviewers, with space for an open discussion around their research with the reviewers. Reviewers and co-reviewers are recognised for their expertise among the broader research community, and they can receive citations for their peer review outputs. These transparent conversations help readers to better understand the strengths and limitations of the research via the public reports and to receive greater insight into the research and scholarly publishing process. Our experiences here seem to be borne out by recent research from Ross-Hellauer and Horbach (2024), which shows that many concerns around open identities, such as reviewers being more reluctant to review in open identity models, are contested or unsupported by the available evidence.
We hope that the Nature portfolio of journals and other scholarly publishers continue to build on the positive steps forward by implementing fully open and transparent peer review in the future. The additional steps of naming reviewers and providing unique identifiers for each peer review report, for example, would have a significant positive impact on the transparency and accountability of the peer review process.
Fostering an open peer review model with transparency at its heart is at the core of F1000’s mission and we are proud to have been at the forefront of advocating for change for more than a decade. It is heartening to see other publishers support and validate this mission, and we look forward to seeing more of the scholarly publishing industry move towards open peer review models.
Learn more about Open Peer Review at F1000’s Resources for Researchers here.