Open peer review

In February 2006, the journal Biology Direct was launched by BioMed Central, adding another alternative to the traditional model of peer review.

If authors can find three members of the Editorial Board who will each return a report or will themselves solicit an external review, the article will be published.

[13][independent source needed] In the social sciences, there have been experiments with wiki-style, signed peer reviews, for example in an issue of the Shakespeare Quarterly.

[citation needed] Peerage of Science went out of business only a few year after it was founded, because it could attract neither enough publishers nor enough reviewers.

In 2014, Life implanted an open peer review system,[19] under which the peer-review reports and authors' responses are published as an integral part of the final version of each article.

[20] In an effort to address issues with the reproducibility of research results, some scholars are asking that authors agree to share their raw data as part of the peer review process.

[21] As far back as 1962, for example, a number of psychologists have attempted to obtain raw data sets from other researchers, with mixed results, in order to reanalyze them.

The notion of obtaining, let alone requiring, open data as a condition of peer review remains controversial.

[22] In 2020 peer review lack of access to raw data led to article retractions in prestigious The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet.

Open identities have been argued to incite reviewers to be "more tactful and constructive" than they would be if they could remain anonymous, while however allowing authors to accumulate enemies who try to keep their papers from being published or their grant applications from being successful.

[50] An article by Lonni Besançon et al. has also argued that open peer review helps evaluate the legitimacy of manuscripts that contain editorial conflict of interests; the authors argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred many publishers to open up their review process, increasing transparency in the process.