Back in 2017, I was asked to peer review an article and its author asked if I would like the review to be “open” – that is that my name would be shown as a reviewer; [cite]10.1073/pnas.1709586114[/cite/] indeed it was!
Open peer review
However, I soon found out that neither of the reviews themselves would be shown alongside the article, an experience that I commented on at the time.[cite]10.59350/j44h6-d3e36[/cite] Replication in Science was – and still is – a hot topic and I had taken the opportunity with this article to try to (successfully I might add) replicate its main (computational) findings. This is something relatively easy to do with computation, but of course far more of challenge to do for experimental work for obvious reasons. I still regularly attempt some level of replication when I review articles nowadays.
So on to 2024, when I was asked – this time as an author – whether I would like the reviews of our own article to be so included, [cite]10.1039/D3DD00246B[/cite] now called transparent peer review.
Now the open aspects have been inverted! Whereas the identity of the reviewers continues to be withheld, their actual reviews are now available to be read, along with the authors’ responses. There is still no way in which any attempt at “replication” can be indicated – the reviews themselves are in free-text form and the reader has to judge for themselves what they might mean and whether replication was part of the process. I also wonder if replication whilst preserving reviewer anonymity can be achieved?
Not all journals by the Royal Society of Chemistry publisher offer transparent review and it is optional of course. But a search of the string “To support increased transparency, we offer authors the option to publish the peer review history alongside their article” suggests around 73 articles in several journals have such review. What is more difficult to establish is what proportion of published articles expose their reviews – is it a high or a low percentage? Time will probably reveal this aspect.
It is also worth noting another experiment along these lines, the so-called Octopus publishing[cite]10.59350/qxjaz-a2298[/cite] model, where a scholarly article can have up to eight distinct components, each in theory written by different authors and where any one section could have several contributions – including a replication study. Each set of authors gets credit, in the form of one or more publication DOIs. This publishing experiment has been running now for almost four years, although I note there are few if any submissions in the area of physical sciences and chemistry.
It might be fair to suggest that with innovations such as these, scholarly publishing is likely to evolve significantly over the next few years.