What is open peer review? A systematic review

“” (Suber, 2012) Page 4 of 32 Within just these two examples, there are already a multitude of factors at play, including the removal of anonymity, the publishing of review reports, interaction between participants, crowdsourcing of reviews, and making manuscripts public pre-review, amongst others.”

“Reviewers often fail to detect major methodological failings (Schroter et al., 2004), with eminent journals (whose higher rejection rates might suggest more stringent peer review processes) seeming to perform no better than others (Fang et al., 2012).”

“Nickerson et al. (2013) advise that the development of a taxonomy should begin by identifying the appropriate meta-characteristic – in this case distinct individual innovations to the traditional peer review system.”

“Published reports can enable readers to consider these criticisms themselves, and “have a chance to examine and appraise this process of ”creative disagreement” and form their own opinions” (Peters & Ceci, 1982).”

“Next, “confirmatory bias” is theorized to lead to conservatism, biasing reviewers against innovative methods or results contrary to dominant theoretical perspectives (Chubin & Hackett, 1990; Garcia et al., 2016; Mahoney, 1977).”

“, 2017) mean that editors and reviewers seem primed to prefer positive results over negative or neutral ones (Bardy, 1998; Dickersin et al., 1992; Fanelli, 2010; Ioannidis, 1998), and to disfavour replication studies (Campanario, 1998; Kerr et al.”

“Smith, an experienced editor, for example, reports reviewers stealing ideas and passing them off as their own, or intentional blocking or delaying publication of competitors’ ideas through harsh reviews (Smith, 2006).”

“, 2017) mean that editors and reviewers seem primed to prefer positive results over negative or neutral ones (Bardy, 1998; Dickersin et al., 1992; Fanelli, 2010; Ioannidis, 1998), and to disfavour replication studies (Campanario, 1998; Kerr et al.”

“…of “impact” and “excellence” (Moore et al., 2017) mean that editors and reviewers seem primed to prefer positive results over negative or neutral ones (Bardy, 1998; Dickersin et al., 1992; Fanelli, 2010; Ioannidis, 1998), and to disfavour replication studies (Campanario, 1998; Kerr et al., 1977).”

“Indeed, open peer review is now predominantlyseen by researchers as an umbrella term that may encompass many different approaches to the review process, such as named reviewers, published reviews, and representative reviews (see Ross-Hellauer, 2017).”

“At the same time, experiments in open and pre- and post-publication peer review (Ross-Hellauer, 2017; Ross-Hellauer et al., 2017; Teixeira da Silva et al., 2016) have created preprint review platforms such as Review Commons (ASAPbio & EMBO, n. d.), Early Evidence Base (EMBO Press, n.d.), Society…”

“Its other features include reviewer’s reports being published alongside articles, manuscript being made available to the public for comments (Ross-Hellauer, 2017), and publication of data with the research”

“22 Criticising the ‘blackbox’ of traditional peer review for allowing reviewers, editors and authors 23 significant power to subvert the process, Ross-Hellauer (2017) offers a schema of seven OPR traits including ‘open identities’ (p.7), alternatively termed signed or unblinded review.”

“A systematic review has been conducted to define "open peer review," leading to the proposal of a practical definition (Ross-Hellauer, 2017).”

“Authors can also leverage institutional or subject repositories to deposit post-peer-reviewed versions of their work [69], or use open preprint servers such as arXiv (https://arxiv.org), bioR-xiv (https://www.biorxiv.org), EcoEvoRxiv (https://ecoevorxiv.org), medRxiv (https://www. medrxiv.org),…”

“As a final step we propose that all the community is involved in the process of peer reviewing by abolishing the editorial selection process through ‘open participation’ (or ‘open interaction’, ‘open platform’ [22,23]).”

“Open peer review, intended to foster transparency (Tennant et al., 2017), may instead reinforce hierarchies, as elite affiliations confer implicit legitimacy, leading to preferential treatment (Ross-Hellauer, 2017), while less prestigious institutions face greater scrutiny (Bravo et al., 2019).”

“Journals can encourage pre-printing by integrating preprinting into the submission process, but also promoting preprints and openly inviting review of them from the scientific community, as described below (Ross-Hellauer, 2017).”

“Open identities (Ross-Hellauer 2017), where author and reviewer identities are known but reviews are closed to the public, are meant to improve review quality and accountability and lead to reviews that are more constructive and thoughtfully worded, albeit evidence for those outcomes remains sparse.”

“For example, open peer review is progressively emerging as an alternative way to the rigid and slow classical canons of scientific communication (Ross-Hellauer, 2017).”

“One of these practices regards the use of alternative metrics, a.k.a. altmetrics (Priem, Taraborelli, Groth, & Neylon, 2010 Ross-Hellauer, 2017; Ross-Hellauer, Deppe, & Schmidt, 2017).”

“In this line, Ross-Hellauer reported that there are at least 22 different combinations or definitions for OPR in the literature (3).”

“It is pointed out that by open peer review, such valuable "discussions among authors and peer reviewers do not go wasted" [9], which is beneficial for potential future reviewers as reviewer reports themselves can be educational not only by 1 1 1 1”

“These forms of peer review can be contrasted with unblinded review where “authors and reviewers are aware of each other’s identities” (Ross-Hellauer, 2017, p. 9).”

“Thus, in areas such as medicine the practice of not just conducing peer review but ‘Open Peer Review’ has become increasingly common ( Haffar et al., 2019 ; Ross-Hellauer, 2017 ).”

“Indeed, in a recent review article in F1000Research, Tony Ross-Hellauer of Göttingen State and University Library reported how he had identified 22 distinct forms of ’open peer review’ among scientific journals (Ross-Hellauer, 2017).”

“Top publishers often use waiver policies to promote open-access publishing (45).”

“This fear can reduce the willingness of qualified experts to review or may lead to overly cautious feedback (Ross-Hellauer 2017; Tennant et al. 2016).”

“21,22 Although each of these systems has advantages and disadvantages, each system has the potential for introduction of reviewer bias.”

“AEOCs and LTAs, alongside OPR, would further diversify manuscript types offered by the journal, democratize the system of academic debate, offer stronger protection of authors’ rights from potential editorial inequalities, and ultimately provide a formal mechanism that allows for the transparent expression of concern…”

“Peer review is definable, as Ross-Hellauer (2017) suggests, as the formal quality assurance mechanism whereby scholarly manuscripts (e.g., journal articles, books, grant applications and conference papers) are made subject to the scrutiny of others, whose feedback and judgements are then used to…”

“First, peer-reviewed articles represent the intersection of current events and cutting-edge science; these papers have undergone extensive review by a committee of peers to evaluate the scientific rigor and accuracy of arguments made therein (Ross-Hellauer, 2017).”

“Open peer review has neither a standardized definition nor an agreed schema of its features and implementations (Ross-Hellauer, 2017). Ross-Hellauer (2017) collected the corpus of 122 definitions and analysed them for their content and proposed the following definition: ‘Open peer review is an umbrella term for a numb…”

“They add a layer of scrutiny, potentially improving the quality of reviews as they are subject to public examination (Fox 2021; Ross-Hellauer 2017).”

“…initiatives aimed at making the peer review and quality assurance processes better quality and reproducible, more democratic and transparent, more equitable and inclusive, and more efficient and incentivising (Ross-Hellauer 2017; Tennant et al. 2017; Waltman et al. 2023; Woods et al. 2023).”

“Open peer review (OPR) enhances transparency by publishing reviews, revealing reviewer identities, or enabling public discussions (Ross-Hellauer, 2017; Henriquez, 2023; Wolfram et al., 2020).”

“Other journals, particularly in medicine, developed various forms of “open peer review” (Ross-Hellauer 2017), where reviewers’ names and reports are published as part of the article.”

“To encourage accountability, editors’ names are listed on the articles they accept, and reviewers may choose to be named or anonymous (cf. Ross-Hellauer 2017).”

“A more fitting approach would have been an “open peer review process” with known author/reviewer identities and interaction (Ford, 2013; Ross-Hellauer, 2017).”

“…and structured checklists (Bruce et al., 2016), the use of large language models (Doskaliuk et al., 2025; Lee et al., 2025), open review models (Ross-Hellauer, 2017), and technical innovations such as blockchain-based systems designed to enhance transparency and trust (Morales-Alarcón et al.,…”

“Just 4 years later, Ross-Hellauer (2017), completing a systematic review of indexed articles until 2016 on OPR, identified 122 definitions that could be simplified into seven traits, simplified as six: (1) open identities, allowing for better reviews due to greater scrutiny and thus greater…”

“This disclosure may be set within the framework of an open peer review model of publication in which reviewers, editors and authors’ names are disclosed to one another [51,52].”

“…solution that has been rarely discussed in the social work literature, 1 but which has been increasingly advocated for (e.g., Godlee, 2002; Ross-Hellauer, 2017a) and adopted (e.g., Association for Psychological Science, 2022; “Infant and Child Development,” 2020; “Transparent Peer…”

“In contrast, the reviewer ’ s and author ’ s identities are disclosed in an open peer review (Ross-Hellauer, 2017).”

“The more prominent and represented claims are to make research publications and research data openly accessible and retrievable, followed by debates on openness in diverse research-related processes like peer review (Ross-Hellauer, 2017) or research software (Jiménez et al., 2017).”

“The editorial assessment of journal submissions and the embedding of peer review in this assessment is becoming increasingly complex and diverse (Ross-Hellauer, 2017; Siler & Strang, 2017).”

“…a number of different features: disclosing the author’s identity to reviewers (single-blind), vice versa (unmasking), or both; documenting the pre-publication history alongside articles; and/or, inviting experts beyond those conducting the initial review to provide feedback (Ross-Hellauer, 2017).”

“2 Ross-Hellauer (2017) realizou estudo de investigação das diversas acepções de avaliação aberta por pares (open peer review).”

“In fact, Ross-Hellauer (2017) found at least 22 different definitions of ‘open peer review’, showing that the phrase is currently highly ambiguous and has not yet settled into a single set of features or schema for implementation.”

“Open peer review, “despite being a major pillar of Open Science, has neither a standardized definition nor an agreed schema of its features and implementations” (Ross-Hellauer, 2017, p. 1).”

“Пока эмпирические исследования не смогли однозначно поддержать или опровер-гнуть позиции сторон (van Rooyen et al., 2010; Ross-Hellauer, 2017).”

“In open peer review, authors and reviewers know each other’s identity and sometimes reviewer reports are published next to the articles (Ross-Hellauer, 2017), whereas in post-publication peer review, articles are reviewed after publication in an open review process (Ford, 2015).”

“A goal of open peer review is to improve the quality of reviews and eliminate problems caused by nontransparency.(25) Some journals either require reviewers to share their identity or give them that option.”