Open research: Enhancing transparency in peer review - Langley‐Evans - 2022 - Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics - Wiley Online Library

"Unfortunately, the ideas that underpin open science meet most resistance within universities at the level of individual researchers. This is because cultural shifts in non-commercial environments take some time to accomplish and academia is notorious for its lack of change agility and inertia....

Some journals have now adopted a model of open review in which the authors and the reviewers are made known to each other from the start. This is proposed to encourage a civil debate about the work and improve its quality, as well as to enhance reviewer performance. However, there is a risk that a relatively junior reviewer may feel too intimidated to openly criticise the work of a senior researcher in the field (and who they may want to work with in future) and there are concerns that reviewers may not wish to review on those terms, making life difficult for editors to secure the necessary level of scrutiny for papers. Transparent peer review removes some of this concern. With this approach, anonymity can be preserved during the review process but, after the paper is accepted, the reviews and author responses are published along with the paper, for open scrutiny. The identity of the reviewer can remain concealed during the review process but, in a fully transparent review, their identity would be made public after paper acceptance....

The Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics has operated with double-blind peer review for many years. Recently, the journal has joined the Wiley Transparent Peer Review pilot scheme. This brings together the publisher with Publons and ScholarOne (part of Clarivate Web of Science) and enables the entire peer review process associated with a paper to be published alongside the accepted paper. Our papers now have an Open Research section, which provides a link to the digital object identifier and allow readers to see the peer review content. The peer review and author responses are in themselves citable materials. Our transparent peer review is a voluntary process for both authors and reviewers. Authors can opt to keep the peer review comments unpublished and reviewers can remain anonymous but still have their comments published....

Despite our push for openness through the transparent peer review scheme, there seems to be a reluctance to participate....

I would like to finish this editorial with an exhortation to take part in the revolution. Let us make research in the area of nutrition and dietetics more open! The advantages are clear. Open science is more interesting science, more collaborative science and kinder science. Transparent peer review is not something to be feared and should instead prompt constructive dialogues between authors, editors and peer reviewers. If there are some dinosaurs out there who still want to use peer review as a platform for bullying their junior colleagues, they will be in for a shock as the growth of more healthy research environments and communities leaves them behind. Transparent peer review is certainly not a panacea, but it is a great step forward to put right some of the historical problems that lie in the peer review system."