---
title: "Open peer review"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_peer_review"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:14:41.654347+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== History ==
In 1997, the open participation journal Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence was launched. Articles were first "published" (meaning the day when the article is first made public), then "reviewed" (meaning a open process of public discussion), and then "refereed" (meaning the confidential pass/fail decision of whether to accept the article or not). In 1999, the open access journal Journal of Medical Internet Research was launched, which from its inception decided to publish the names of the reviewers at the bottom of each published article. Also in 1999, the British Medical Journal moved to an open peer review system, revealing reviewers' identities to the authors but not the readers, and in 2000, the medical journals in the open access BMC series published by BioMed Central, launched using open peer review. As with the BMJ, the reviewers' names are included on the peer review reports. In addition, if the article is published the reports are made available online as part of the "pre-publication history"'.
Several other journals published by the BMJ Group allow optional open peer review, as does PLoS Medicine, published by the Public Library of Science. The BMJ's Rapid Responses allows ongoing debate and criticism following publication.
In June 2006, Nature launched an experiment in parallel open peer review: some articles that had been submitted to the regular anonymous process were also available online for open, identified public comment. The results were less than encouraging – only 5% of authors agreed to participate in the experiment, and only 54% of those articles received comments. The editors have suggested that researchers may have been too busy to take part and were reluctant to make their names public. The knowledge that articles were simultaneously being subjected to anonymous peer review may also have affected the uptake.
In February 2006, the journal Biology Direct was launched by BioMed Central, adding another alternative to the traditional model of peer review. If authors can find three members of the Editorial Board who will each return a report or will themselves solicit an external review, the article will be published. As with Philica, reviewers cannot suppress publication, but in contrast to Philica, no reviews are anonymous and no article is published without being reviewed. Authors have the opportunity to withdraw their article, to revise it in response to the reviews, or to publish it without revision. If the authors proceed with publication of their article despite critical comments, readers can clearly see any negative comments along with the names of the reviewers. 
In the social sciences, there have been experiments with wiki-style, signed peer reviews, for example in an issue of the Shakespeare Quarterly.
In 2010, the BMJ began publishing signed reviewer's reports alongside accepted papers, after determining that telling reviewers that their signed reviews might be posted publicly did not significantly affect the quality of the reviews.
In 2011, Peerage of Science, an independent peer review service, was launched with several non-traditional approaches to academic peer review. Most prominently, these include the judging and scoring of the accuracy and justifiability of peer reviews, and concurrent usage of a single peer review round by several participating journals. Peerage of Science went out of business only a few year after it was founded, because it could attract neither enough publishers nor enough reviewers.
Starting in 2013 with the launch of F1000Research, some publishers have combined open peer review with post-publication peer review by using a versioned article system.  At F1000Research, articles are published before review, and invited peer review reports (and reviewer names) are published with the article as they come in. Author-revised versions of the article are then linked to the original. A similar post-publication review system with versioned articles is used by Science Open launched in 2014.
Also in 2013, researchers from College of Information and Computer Sciences at University of Massachusetts Amherst founded OpenReview website to host anonymized review reports together with articles, which is as of 2023 popular among computer scientists.
In 2014, Life implanted an open peer review system, under which the peer-review reports and authors' responses are published as an integral part of the final version of each article.
Since 2016, Synlett is experimenting with closed crowd peer review. The article under review is sent to a pool of 80+ expert reviewers who then collaboratively comment on the manuscript.
In an effort to address issues with the reproducibility of research results, some scholars are asking that authors agree to share their raw data as part of the peer review process. As far back as 1962, for example, a number of psychologists have attempted to obtain raw data sets from other researchers, with mixed results, in order to reanalyze them. A recent attempt resulted in only seven data sets out of fifty requests. The notion of obtaining, let alone requiring, open data as a condition of peer review remains controversial. In 2020 peer review lack of access to raw data led to article retractions in prestigious The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. Many journals now require access to raw data to be included in peer review.

== Adoption ==

=== Adoption by publishers ===
These publishers and journals operate various types of open peer review: