Open peer review: A randomised controlled trial

Elizabeth Walsh · Maeve Rooney · Louis Appleby · Greg Wilkinson

261 citations0/0 files storedThe British Journal of Psychiatry

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Publishing and Scholarly Communication Academic Writing and Publishing Academic Publishing and Open Access

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Most scientific journals practise anonymous peer review. There is no evidence, however, that this is any better than an open system. AIMS: To evaluate the feasibility of an open peer review system. METHOD: Reviewers for the British Journal of Psychiatry were asked whether they would agree to have their name revealed to the authors whose papers they review; 408 manuscripts assigned to reviewers who agreed were randomised to signed or unsigned groups. We measured review quality, tone, recommendation for publication and time taken to complete each review. RESULTS: A total of 245 reviewers (76%) agreed to sign. Signed reviews were of higher quality, were more courteous and took longer to complete than unsigned reviews. Reviewers who signed were more likely to recommend publication. CONCLUSIONS: This study supports the feasibility of an open peer review system and identifies such a system's potential drawbacks.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 261 citations exist upstream.

References

1999Effect of open peer review on quality of reviews and on reviewers'recommendations: a randomised trial 1998Effect on the Quality of Peer Review of Blinding Reviewers and Asking Them to Sign Their Reports 1998What Makes a Good Reviewer and a Good Review for a General Medical Journal?1990The Effects of Blinding on the Quality of Peer Review

Cited by

2017A manifesto for reproducible science 2016How open science helps researchers succeed 2001Testing and adjusting for publication bias 2014ITK: enabling reproducible research and open science 2007Editorial peer review for improving the quality of reports of biomedical studies 2004Effects of training on quality of peer review: randomised controlled trial 2021Open science saves lives: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic 2002Measuring the Quality of Editorial Peer Review

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.