---
title: "Open peer review"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_peer_review"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:36.870107+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Publishers:
BioMed Central
BMJ Group
Copernicus Publications
European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)
Frontiers
MDPI (authors have the option to publish peer review reports, etc.)
Nature Research
Open Research Europe (the European Union publishing platform for Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 projects)
Journals:
eLife
GigaScience
Nature
PeerJ
PLOS
ReScience C
Semantic Web journal by IOS Press
WikiJournal
SciPost
Peer review at The BMJ, BioMed Central, EMBO, eLife, ReScience C, and the Semantic Web journal involves posting the entire pre-publication history of the article online, including not only signed reviews of the article, but also its previous versions and in some cases names of handling editors and author responses to the reviewers. Furthermore, the Semantic Web journal publishes reviews of all submissions, including rejected ones, on its website, while eLife plans to publish the reviews not only for published articles, but also for rejected articles.
The European Geosciences Union operates public discussions where open peer review is conducted before suitable articles are accepted for publication in the journal.
Sci, an open access journal which covers all research fields, adapted a post publication public peer-review (P4R) in which it promised authors immediate visibility of their manuscripts on the journal's online platform after a brief and limited check of scientific soundness and proper reporting and against plagiarism and offensive material; the manuscript is rendered open for public review by the entire community.
In 2021, the authors of nearly half of the articles published by Nature chose to publish the reviewer reports as well. The journal considered this as an encouraging trial of transparent peer review. From 2025, all published articles will be accompanied by the reviewer reports and author responses.

=== Open peer review of preprints ===
Some platforms, including some preprint servers, facilitate open peer review of 
preprints. 

Beginning in 2007, the platform SciRate allowed registered users to recommend articles posted on the arXiv preprint server, displaying the number of recommendations or "scites" each current preprint had received.
Since 2013, the platform OpenReview provides a flexible system for performing open peer review, with various choices about "who has access to what information, and when". This platform is commonly used by computer science conferences.
In 2017, the platform PREreview was launched to empower diverse and historically excluded communities of researchers (particularly those at the early stages of their careers) to find a voice, train, and engage in open peer review of preprints. Reviewers can review preprints from over 20 preprint servers on the platform.
In 2019, the preprint server BioRxiv started allowing posting reviews alongside preprints, in addition to allowing comments on preprints. The reviews can come from journals or from platforms such as Review Commons.
In 2019, Qeios launched a multidisciplinary, open-access scientific publishing platform that allows the open peer review of both preprints and final articles.
In 2020, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform Outbreak Science Rapid PREreview was launched in order to perform rapid open peer review of preprints related to emerging outbreaks. The platform initially worked with preprints from medRxiv, bioRxiv and arXiv.

== Advantages and disadvantages ==

=== Argued ===
Open identities have been argued to incite reviewers to be "more tactful and constructive" than they would be if they could remain anonymous, while however allowing authors to accumulate enemies who try to keep their papers from being published or their grant applications from being successful.
Open peer review in all its forms has been argued to favour more honest reviewing, and to prevent reviewers from following their individual agendas.
An article by Lonni Besançon et al. has also argued that open peer review helps evaluate the legitimacy of manuscripts that contain editorial conflict of interests; the authors argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred many publishers to open up their review process, increasing transparency in the process.

=== Observed ===
In an experiment with 56 research articles accepted by the Medical Journal of Australia in 1996–1997, the articles were published online together with the peer reviewers' comments; readers could email their comments and the authors could amend their articles further before print publication. The investigators concluded that the process had modest benefits for authors, editors and readers.
Some studies have found that open identities lead to an increase in the quality of reviews, while other studies find no significant effect.
Open peer review at BMJ journals has lent itself to randomized trials to study open identity and open report reviews. These studies did not find that open identities and open reports significantly affected the quality of review or the rate of acceptance of articles for publication, and there was only one reported instance of a conflict between authors and reviewers ("adverse event"). The only significant negative effect of open peer review was "increasing the likelihood of reviewers declining to review".
In some cases, open identities have helped detect reviewers' conflicts of interests.
Open participation has been criticised as being a form of popularity contest in which well known authors are more likely to get their manuscripts reviewed than others. However, even with this implementation of Open Peer Reviews, both authors and reviewers acknowledged that Open Reviews could lead to a higher quality of reviews, foster collaborations and reduce the "cite-me" effect.
According to a 2020 Nature editorial, experience from Nature Communications negates the concerns that open reports would be less critical, or would require an excessive amount of work from reviewers.
Thanks to published reviewer comments, it is possible to conduct quantitative studies of the peer review process. For example, a 2021 study has found that scrutiny by more reviewers mostly does not correlate with more impactful papers.

== See also ==
Open peer commentary
Open research
Open science
Open science data
PubPeer

== References ==