Meta-Research: Journal policies and editors' opinions on peer review
- University of Melbourne, Australia
- University of Groningen, Netherlands
Abstract
Peer review practices differ substantially between journals and disciplines. This study presents the results of a survey of 322 editors of journals in ecology, economics, medicine, physics and psychology. We found that 49% of the journals surveyed checked all manuscripts for plagiarism, that 61% allowed authors to recommend both for and against specific reviewers, and that less than 2% used a form of open peer review. Most journals did not have an official policy on altering reports from reviewers, but 91% of editors identified at least one situation in which it was appropriate for an editor to alter a report. Editors were also asked for their views on five issues related to publication ethics. A majority expressed support for co-reviewing, reviewers requesting access to data, reviewers recommending citations to their work, editors publishing in their own journals, and replication studies. Our results provide a window into what is largely an opaque aspect of the scientific process. We hope the findings will inform the debate about the role and transparency of peer review in scholarly publishing.
Data availability
De-identified responses to Survey A and coding data for Survey B are publicly available (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/CY2RE).
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Data from: Policies and opinions on peer review: A cross-disciplinary survey.Open Science Framework, doi: 10.17605/osf.io/cy2re.
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Author details
Funding
The authors received no specific funding for this work.
Ethics
Human subjects: Both surveys were reviewed and approved the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Science Human Ethics Advisory Group (Project ID: 1954490.1) prior to distribution. All participants were provided detailed information about the purpose of the study, and informed that information on routine peer review policies and practices at their journal, as well as their views on some publication ethics issues were going to be collected. Informed consent was obtained from participants prior to beginning each survey.
Copyright
© 2020, Hamilton et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Meta-Research: Journal policies and editors' opinions on peer review
eLife 9:e62529.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.62529
