Highlights
- •The peer review process determines the selection of studies that will inform health care decisions.
- •The single-blind model (reviewers unknown to authors) is adopted by most biomedical journals.
- •Blinding also reviewers (double-blind model) is tricky and does not improve reports' quality.
- •Open peer review ensures transparency about study reports that may influence clinical practice.
- •Also the editorial process should be made public, avoiding an excessive focus on reviewers' role.
Abstract
Published medical research influences health care providers and policy makers, guides
patient management, and is based on the peer review process. Peer review should prevent
publication of unreliable data and improve study reporting, but there is little evidence
that these aims are fully achieved. In the blinded systems, authors and readers do
not know the reviewers' identity. Moreover, the reviewers' reports are not made available
to readers. Anonymous peer review poses an ethical imbalance toward authors, who are
judged by masked referees, and to the medical community and society at large, in case
patients suffer the consequences of acceptance of flawed manuscripts or erroneous
rejection of important findings. Some general medical journals have adopted an open
process, require reviewers to sign their reports, and links online pre-publication
histories to accepted articles. This system increases editors' and reviewers' accountability
and allows public scrutiny, consenting readers understand on which basis were decisions
taken and by whom. Moreover, this gives credit to reviewers for their apparently thankless
job, as online availability of signed and scored reports may contribute to researchers'
academic curricula. However, the transition from the blind to the open system could
pose problems to journals. Reviewers may be more difficult to find, and publishers
or medical societies could resist changes that may affect editorial costs and journals'
revenues. Nonetheless, also considering the risk of competing interests in the medical
field, general and major specialty journals could consider testing the effects of
open review on manuscripts regarding studies that may influence clinical practice.
Abbreviations:
COI (Conflicts of interest), DOI (Digital object identifiers), ORCID (Open researcher and contributor ID)Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: April 26, 2016
Accepted:
April 12,
2016
Received in revised form:
April 8,
2016
Received:
March 25,
2016
Identification
Copyright
© 2016 European Federation of Internal Medicine. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
