The Institute of Physics (IOP) recently announced that it will be phasing in double-blind peer review for all of its journals, expecting the process to be complete by the end of next year. IOP is by no means the only publisher that has taken this step, but I have been interested to see what look like countervailing trends in the scholarly communication ecosystem in recent years: some entities moving toward more open peer review, and others toward maximally blind peer review. I posed some questions to Kim Eggleton, IOP’s Research Integrity and Inclusion Manager (@EggletonKim):
For those of our readers who may not be completely familiar with the nomenclature, can you explain how double-blind peer review works?
In double-blind peer review, the identities of the authors and reviewers are concealed from each other. In physics the traditional method of peer review has been single-blind, where the reviewers are aware of the authors’ identities. Double-blind is more common in humanities and social sciences.
As a term “blind” is ableist and very easily misunderstood – I’ve lost count of the number of times people have assumed “double-blind” means two reviewers. We are keen for the industry to move away from the use of ‘blind’ and look forward to more inclusive and clearer terminology being developed by the STM peer review taxonomy group.
What prompted IOP to take this step at this time?
We are always working on new ways to support and improve the peer review process at IOP Publishing. We’ve been offering double-blind peer review as an option on some of our journals for a few years now in response to demands from the community. Countless studies (Mulligan, Hall & Raphael, 2012; Chun-Man Ho, Mak, Tao, Lu, Day & Pan, 2013, Jamali, Nicholas, Watkinson, Abrizah, Rodriguez-Bravo, Boukacem‐Zeghmour, Xu, Polezhaeva, Herman & Świgon, 2019) have shown that double-blind peer review is perceived to be the fairest model with the level of comfort for all parties, especially under-represented minorities increased in a double-blind scenario. After some analysis in 2018, we realized we needed to do more to make our editorial boards and reviewer pools as diverse as possible. We’re dedicated to ensuring that we provide a welcoming and equitable space for people that choose to work with us, whether that’s as an author, reviewer, board member or reader. As a learned society publisher we have a responsibility to do what we can to ensure equality, diversity, and inclusivity within science. Not just because diversity has been shown to benefit science, but because it’s the right thing to do.