5 Things We Learned About Peer Review in 2019 | Absolutely Maybe

In January, Giangiacomo & co reported on an Elsevier pilot in 5 journals, with 9,220 manuscripts and 18,525 reviews between 2010 and 2017. Knowing their peer reviews would be published didn’t deter people from reviewing or change much, when they knew they had the choice of signing the report or not. That said, older academics were deterred a bit, and younger ones and non-academics were more keen to review. Overall, only 8.1% agreed to have their names public, and they appeared to be much more likely to be cases where the referees recommended accepting the article for publication. (I couldn’t find the names of the 5 journals in the article, but they are here: Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, Annals of Medicine and Surgery, Engineering Fracture Mechanics, Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies, International Journal of Surgery.) In November, confirmation of this phenomenon arrived from Nino van Sambeek and Daniël Lakens, although the rate of signing was much higher at the open journals they studied: 37–38%. They studied peer review reports published for articles accepted in 2 PeerJ journals (8,155 altogether) and 2 journals from the Royal Society (RS) (3,756 from RS Open Science and RS Open Biology). Signed reports recommended rejection 2% of the time; unsigned ones, 10% of the time.