Double-blind peer review process

Both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity.

A more complete and fair method of recognizing the contribution of a reviewer to the final version of the article, would be to list them in the article, which would require open peer reviews. Journals and indexers can organize systems to provide public recognition to open reviewers, but more educational efforts are required to change the mind of those defending the old-fashioned blind and double-blind peer review processes ¹⁾ ²⁾.

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Wicherts JM. Peer review quality and transparency of the peer-review process in open access and subscription journals. PLoS One. 2016;11(1):e0147913. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147913.

²⁾

Transparency in peer review. Nat Hum Behav. 2019;3(12):1237. doi: 10.1038/s41562-019-0799-8.