Towards five stars of transparent pre-publication peer review | WoW! Wouter on the Web

"Inspired by the new OASPA, DOAJ, COPE and WAME “Principles of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing“. I like to zoom in on their first point. The peer review process. The following is stated on peer review: 'All of a journal’s content, apart from any editorial material that is clearly marked as such, shall be subjected to peer review. Peer review is defined as obtaining advice on individual manuscripts from reviewers expert in the field who are not part of the journal’s editorial staff. This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, shall be clearly described on the journal’s Web site.' I don’t think this is statement alone is sufficient to improve transparency of the peer review process. I have seen many journal that patiently state that their journal is either blind or double blind peer reviewed. But there is not a shred of evidence for this being the case. In my role as subject chair for Scopus I review a lot of journals. I have therefore thought quite a bit about this subject. I would propose a five star system for the transparency of the peer review process. Inspired by the five stars of linked (open) data as drafted by Tim Berners Lee. I wish to present the 5 stars for peer review transparency. 1 *: Providing clear dates of submission, revision, acceptance and publication 2 **: Listing the reviewers involved once a year 3 ***: Providing a yearly overview of submissions and acceptance 4 ****: Naming the handling editors and reviewers per article 5 *****: Publishing the review reports online alongside the final article ..."