Over the years, peer review has evolved. This evolution of peer review has led to many different types. Choosing what of these types of peer review you should be implementing for your journal is critical. Because they accomplish different things, understanding the current state of peer review can help you be more transparent. This is very important. One journals may benefit from having an “open peer review” system, but another may be better served by a “double blind” system. But, what are these different systems? How do they all work, and more importantly, how do they change the ways in which a journal functions?
This is to say, “what are the differences and why do they matter”?
Here, we’ll tackle some of the more common forms of peer review and how they might have an impact on your journal.
Open peer review
Starting here: “open peer review” tends to be more of an umbrella term. And it includes several variations of peer review.
Generally, it is a very transparent system. For example, in one form, peer reviewers comments are published alongside the final manuscript. In publishing the comments, the reader can be aware of what peer reviewers actually had to say about the work. In addition, they can also see what the authors actually did to address the reviewer comments (or not).
Increasingly, this system is being used by many journals. Because there are different variations of open reviews, different journals may use slightly different iterations. This can often leave people wondering “what exactly is open peer review”. Understandably, it is incumbent on the journal to be clear about what they mean when they say that they use open peer review. Different peer review types might not be understood well by authors, so being transparent about exactly what “open peer review” means in the context of your journal is important.
Some companies implement different versions of open peer review across their entire journal portfolios. This means that even in one company, multiple versions of peer review might exist.
We will go into more detail about the open peer review processes in the future.
One of the important results of using this system is that bias can be spotted by a reader. This translates into extra care being needed to ensure that the review process maintains high rigorous standards.
While many people might claim that a single blind (or double blind) system is better, others will claim the opposite. As such, authors need to understand the pros and cons of this type of peer review.
Single-blind peer review
What is commonly described as “peer review” is probably more accurately described as “single-blind peer review”.
In this kind of review, the author of the paper does not know the identity of the reviewers. This has obvious benefits—it protects the identity of the reviewer(s). This ensures that authors do not know (and thusly cannot influence) the person reviewing their work. But a single-blind review also carries a risk of bias.
In these cases of peer review, the author doesn’t know the reviewers. However, the reviewers can see who wrote the paper. It is not impossible to imagine a situation (rare as it might be) where the reviewer knows and does not like the author of the research. Rejection of an authors work in this kind of situation isn’t impossible.
While this could conceivably happen, many companies ensure that the peer review process often has guardrails. Often, it is rare that a single review can prevent publication of valid research. In many cases, multiple peer review reports are sought to ensure validity. As with open peer review, understanding the single-blind process is important.
Double-blind peer review
The double-blind system is arguably the most neutral of the peer review systems. In this system, the author(s) and the reviewers do not know who the other parties are. This means that the only thing that a reviewer has access to is the research itself. This creates a greater degree of anonymity compared to the single-blind peer-review system.
In these reviews, the peer reviewers have no information about who the authors of a paper are, and the authors don’t know who the reviewers are.
This degree of anonymity is accomplished by removing all markers of identity. So, no affiliations, names, positions, etc., are given, leaving only the research to be evaluated.
Triple-blind peer review
Without a doubt, this is the most complicated of the “blind” peer reviews. The triple-blind review is a bit more rare than the aforementioned two. In this case, the editors also do not know who is doing the reviews.
This system is the most complicated one, but often thought to be the most rigorous. It allows all parties to have a sort of balance in the discussion. This makes it the most likely to have the best results but the most challenging to manage logistically. As with most things, a trade off exists between how “good” something is, and how “long it takes”.
Post-publication peer review
Post-publication peer review is a useful system in many ways. It allows the journal to publish work more quickly, eliminating the time-consuming peer-review process prior to publication. Here, authors will get their manuscript/research peer reviewed after they submit their work to a journal for publication and it is published.
This peer-review process’ strongest point is also it’s greatest weakness. Information can be disseminated widely and quickly, but also be inaccurate or incomplete. The post-publication review process is something that encourages good faith collaboration, and can create a strong foundation to tackle important issues quickly.
Importantly, for a journal, this can help to increase the speed of publication. Because there is an every-increasing need for more information, more quickly, this can be a powerful tool in the publication process.
There are even situations where certain types of academic publications simply do not have a peer review process. These publications, preprints, for example, use the post-release window to gain feedback on the work. These, in many cases, then go on to be published in peer-reviewed journals after the fact.
Different types of review and reviewers
Finding good peer reviewers is critical to getting a manuscript published.
Importantly, you, as the publisher, should make sure that you are reasonably making every effort possible to accommodate reviewers. Listen to any feedback that you can get on how your reviewers feel about the different peer review systems.
In particular, open peer review might not be a system that all reviewers will agree to use—as with all things, this is generally on a case-by-case basis. One way that you can make life easier for a reviewer, is to provide them with a peer review report template. This can help them to write their peer review reports.
Be careful in selecting the type of peer review you’re going to implement for your journal. Make an informed decision when it comes to establishing a reliable peer-review process for your company.
How do you choose?
It’s important for you to understand what industry expectations are when it comes to your field. If you are in a field where the expected peer review methods are single-blind, you may not benefit from trying to implement a different system.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t, only that you need to be careful in your research and considerations. If you need help to create a more efficient pipeline for your review processes, you should carefully consider all the options and tools at your disposal. What you choose will be related to the amount of transparency that you think is important. Keep in mind that each of these different systems have different degrees of clarity. They all also have different degrees of difficulties to implement.
Some issues might be about costs and some might be about time. Make sure that you make the right choice, because changing it after the fact can be complicated.