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Is anonymity or transparency the best solution to bias in peer review? – Times Higher Education (Kim Eggleton | March 2022)

Posted by Dr Gary Allen in Research Integrity on May 2, 2022
Keywords: Good practice, Institutional responsibilities, Journal, Peer review, Research results

The Linked Original Item was Posted On March 14, 2022

Peer review and scientific process graphic.

Trials suggest that far from being mutually exclusive, both can play an important role, says Kim Eggleton

When reviewing someone’s work, fair judgement is threatened by bias – conscious or otherwise – about their gender, name, nationality, affiliation or career status. That is why a growing chorus in recent years has been calling for new models of peer review to be developed that minimise the opportunity for prejudice to creep in.

Data clearly demonstrates that bias (implicit or overt) besets peer review. It can be seen in the bias evident in the relative publication across underrepresented cohorts found in groups such as gender, race, geographic location, institutional affiliation and career stage.  Anonymity in the peer review process or the transparency of the process have been presented as solutions, but are they mutually exclusive solutions?  This Times Higher Education piece dives into the issues.  We have included links to 11 related items.

Publishers have an obligation to respond to such calls. Interesting experiments have emerged, consisting of varying degrees of openness and achieving varying degrees of success. Fully open peer review, for instance, discloses the identity of both the author and the reviewers to all participants, while collaborative peer review sees referees work together on a single review report or work with authors to improve the paper.

At IOP Publishing, we have introduced two different but complementary approaches to bias reduction at all our self-owned open access journals. As the first physics publisher to adopt these approaches portfolio-wide, we believe the sector will be interested in how they have been received.

THE Campus resources: Understanding peer review – what it is, how it works and why it’s important

In the past year, we’ve moved all our own journals over to double-anonymous peer review, whereby the identities of both the reviewer and author are concealed. Our early data suggest that anonymised papers are more likely to be published, and the feedback we’ve received from both sides has been overwhelmingly positive.

Is anonymity or transparency the best solution to bias in peer review?
Trials suggest that far from being mutually exclusive, both can play an important role, says Kim Eggleton

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Related Reading

Best Practices and Innovative Approaches to Peer Review in Africa – Scholarly Kitchen (Johanna Havemann, et al | August 2021)

TheWebConf 2020 Tutorial on Fairness and Bias in Peer Review and other Sociotechnical Intelligent Systems (Part II on Peer Review) (Papers: Nihar B. Shah & Zachary Lipton | June 2020)

‘TripAdvisor for peer review’ targets publishing bias – Times Higher Education (Jack Grove | January 2020)

Nature will publish peer review reports as a trial – Nature (Editorial | February 2020)

It’s Time to Lift the Veil on Peer Review – UnDark (Dalmeet Singh Chawla | June 2019)

Peer-review experiments tracked in online repository – Nature (Richard Van Noorden | March 2019)

Addressing the Regional Diversity of Reviewers – The Wiley Network (Thomas Gaston | September 2018)

Ask The Chefs: How Would You Ensure Diversity In Peer Review? – Scholarly Kitchen (Ann Michael | September 2018)

Few authors choose anonymous peer review, massive study of Nature journals shows – Science (Martin Enserink | September 2017)

What leads to bias in the scientific literature? New study tries to answer – Retraction Watch (Alison McCook | March 2017)

Peer Review Week: Should we use double blind peer review? The evidence… – methods.blog (Bob O’H: September 2016)

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