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In light of the increasing demand and need for openness and transparency in publishing of scientific papers, we the Editors-in-Chief of The European Journal of Neuroscience, have taken the decision to make our peer-review process more open and transparent. As of November 15th of 2016, coinciding with our Editorial Board Meeting at the Society for Neuroscience Meeting in San Diego, we have instituted a new system of review whereby the full reviews and the entirety of the correspondence between the Editors-in-Chief, the Section Editors and our authors, including the names of the Reviewers, will be made fully available online in parallel with the publication of the paper in our pages. Reviewers' names and affiliations will also be incorporated into the final published paper to acknowledge their important contributions, alongside the Section Editor's name; the latter having already been incorporated into papers at EJN over the past 2 years. There are many forms and levels of 'open reviewing', from simply anonymously publishing the review documents to iterative and interactive processes with the reviews and reviewers revealed at the end of the process. We have chosen to publish all the review documents and names as supplementary material associated with the paper as we believe this will the easiest, requires no additional work from the reviewers and authors, and provides a much greater degree of 'openness'. Note that we are simply following in an already existing tradition. The BioMed Central journals have been providing reviewer names and pre-publication histories for published articles since about 2000. The Frontiers journals have been revealing all reviewers names since their launch in 2007 and several other journals including The EMBO Journal, the European Journal of Immunology and the British Medical Journal have incorporated various forms of open review. We believe this is the future and is clearly the call from many scientists, particularly the new generation of young scientists, who are rightfully demanding more openness and accountability in our system. A central concern of many editors is that with transparent review it may prove much more difficult to engage reviewers, but of course, the Frontiers and BioMed Central Journals are surviving, and indeed, have thrived under this system. The open review feature may well be one of the main reasons that young authors have embraced these new journals so enthusiastically. A recent paper by Kovanis and colleagues also highlights another major inequity on our peer-review system, one that can at least be exposed, if not corrected, by a more open review system (Kovanis et al., 2016). Using a mathematical modeling approach, these authors showed that the majority of reviews in the biomedical sciences (between 69 and 94%) were being performed by just 20% of the qualified available researchers in the field. Frankly, those of us who have served as Editors-in-Chief are already aware of this through our daily experiences engaging reviewers, although perhaps we haven't fully appreciated quite the scale of the issue. We all have our tight coterie of reliable, dedicated, timely, and thorough reviewers and then there are those who never take an assignment or return less than thorough critiques, often days and weeks after the deadline. Much like the millions of people who claim to have been at Woodstock, one wonders how many of our colleagues spend time bellyaching about the burden of reviewing when in fact, they don't care to burden themselves very much at all. Open reviewing should go some way towards exposing this issue. There are special circumstances in this process that will surely arise and that need to be considered. We need to be aware that even best intentions can lead to unintended consequences and that we must protect the research community from potential harassment or reprisal (see e.g. Lewandowsky & Bishop, 2016). Unsurprisingly, not every paper that is initially reviewed results in a consistent set of reviewer opinions. It is sometimes the case that we will have a very enthusiastic reviewer and another who stands adamantly opposed to a paper. Unless the negative reviewer has clearly identified a 'fatal' flaw in the paper, the usual recourse is to engage an adjudicating reviewer to break the tie. In such a case, it is possible that we would end up with two endorsing reviewers but one who simply does not believe that the paper merits publication. These are tough decisions to make, but in such a case, we would typically err on the generous side and allow the paper to proceed. What then of the non-endorsing reviewer? Here, the answer seems clear to us. It would be entirely unfair to disclose the dissenter's identity or to ask that said reviewer be identified on a manuscript that she or he did not ultimately sanction. So in these cases we would publish the paper with only the two endorsing reviewers identified, but at the same time, all the reviews and correspondence, including those of the negative reviewer, will be published online. It is worth emphasizing that in no case will we identify reviewers who have not ultimately endorsed the publication of a given paper. Another possible scenario is that a long and protracted review process could leave a reviewer feeling somewhat 'exposed', even when that reviewer has ultimately approved the paper. Alas, it is not always the case that the back-and-forth between authors and reviewers is as genial as one might hope. It seems clear to us as editors that in the very small minority of cases where the interaction has been less than cordial, and specifically under circumstances where a reviewer feels that they might be compromised through the revelation of their identity, that withholding of the reviewer's name may be prudent. We very much expect that such occasions will occur very rarely, but we will retain the right to anonymize reviews in those cases where we feel there is concern of potential backlash against the reviewer. Another approach that has been used to increase objectivity and fairness in the peer review process is the blinding of reviewers to the identities of the authors of the paper. While in principle, this is a very good idea, in practice it is not so easily implemented or particularly effective in our view. The obvious thing is that in these days of evermore specialized work, it is nigh on impossible for the authors of a paper to remain unidentifiable. A great deal of the work in a given lab follows logically from prior work and it is essentially impossible to disguise the lineage of one's own work. A quick look at the reference list is usually enough to tip the reviewer off. We have therefore decided not to pursue this route here at EJN but we fully endorse the efforts of other editors to use this strategy to try to bring greater levels of fairness to the peer-review process. We fully expect that there will be teething issues as we roll out this new policy. We ask our reviewers and authors to persevere with us as we work through them. In the end, we firmly believe that the result will be a much better, considerably more transparent, and likely highly informative new system. At EJN, our aim is not to chase impact factors or the latest fad or fashion in neuroscience. We are a society-owned journal with a primary mission to serve the members of our national societies and the world neuroscience community, to publish solid, rigorous, reproducible science and to further our understanding of the nervous system in health and disease. In conjunction with our recent introduction of registered reports (Chambers et al., 2017), we are convinced that this approach to more open and transparent reviewing will move us further towards these noble goals.
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