Post provided by Lydia Morley

Today, peer review is a foundation of academic publishing. It serves as a checks and balances system to ensure that researchers present work of high quality, novelty, and relevance to the greater academic community. When our work is accepted for publication, it has quite literally been judged by a jury of our peers. And like a real jury, the review process is also intended to be as objective as possible—reviewers are meant to assess only the impact and quality of the work, and not the author. Of course, peer review as we know it today has not always been an essential component of academic publishing. As society, technology, and academic pursuits evolved and diversified, so did the strategies, protocols, and accepted best-practices for research communication.

Before the mid-20^th century, journals would often employ in-house publication committees to determine the quality and relevance of research papers submitted for publication. These committees would sometimes contact society members or colleagues for help with articles that were out of their areas of expertise, allowing their peers to act as confidential reviewers, but these small committees were the ultimate decision makers. As research areas, and researchers, grew in number, small publishing committees became less and less able to give expert input on every article submitted to their journal. Thus, journals began to recruit academics from the broader community to referee publications. Decentralizing the decision-making process and outsourcing to the broader scientific community was a major step in democratizing academic publication. By the latter 20^th century, movements to further ensure impartiality and objectivity in the review process saw the development of a diversity of formal peer review protocols. These processes exist along a gradient of anonymity, from completely open to double-anonymous.

Open review processes reveal the identity of both the author and reviewers to one another, while single-anonymous systems reveal the author’s identity, but reviewers remain anonymous. Double-anonymous systems keep both parties anonymous from one another throughout the publication process.

In order to ensure fair and unbiased reviews, single and double-anonymous processes enforce anonymity. Single-anonymous systems allow reviewers to give honest and realistic feedback to authors without fear of retaliation. At the same time, reviewers shouldn’t have incentive to judge more easily or harshly the publications of their friends or enemies, and they shouldn’t be influenced by the scholarly status of submitting authors. In other words, a renowned professor’s work should be given equal opportunity, and equal scrutiny, as a post-doctoral researcher’s. Thus, double-anonymous systems work to ensure equity, fairness, and honesty from both ends. While single-anonymous appears to be the most common strategy employed by journals, double-anonymous review processes are becoming more widely used.

When submitting to a double-anonymous journal, authors must take care to leave out any personally identifying information from their submissions. This means that title pages, letters to the editor, and reviewer responses must be submitted separately. To ensure that nothing slips through the cracks, submissions often go through an intermediary handling editor before they reach reviewers. If the handling editor finds any personal information that could jeopardize the author’s anonymity, then the submission is sent back to the author for revision. Though this can be time-consuming, it ensures uniformity across journal submissions and reinforces the journals’ commitment to an unbiased review process for every submission.

In some cases, such as in MEE, authors are forced to remain anonymous while reviewers are allowed to reveal their identity if they so choose. In an effort to increase transparency about publication’s histories and the publication process, MEE also implements a transparent review system, in which readers can access the entire correspondence history for an article, including all reviewer comments and author responses. In this repository, reviewers again are allowed to remain anonymous. This works to ensure accountability at both ends: both authors and reviewers are incentivized to behave fairly and diligently throughout the editing and review process. It also allows younger researchers to glean information about the publication process, furthering the goal of open and accessible science.

As academic publishing has evolved, so has the peer review process. Not even 100 years old, formalized peer review systems are varied and relatively unregulated. Double-anonymous and transparent peer review processes are a progressive attempt to enable publication from a greater diversity of researchers, pursue accountability and transparency across the scientific process, and protect everyone from potential retaliation. As data about article content, readership, and author demographics accumulates, we should attempt to understand how different peer review processes affect these statistics, and adjust our review standards to strive for greater equity, accountability, and transparency in scientific publishing.