key: cord-0252838-9sdbdsqw
authors: Mrša, Vladimir
title: Should we open the reviewing process
date: 2021-03-03
journal: Food Technol Biotechnol
DOI: nan
sha: 2caba430edc6aa9fcba77d65feb14be69ae80b35
doc_id: 252838
cord_uid: 9sdbdsqw

nan

From the point of view of the authors, the situation in which their papers are evaluated by unknown reviewers while at the same time their names are known to them may seem unfair. It is not easy for authors to accept rejections of their papers based on reviewers' opinions without knowing their credentials. It should, however, be mentioned that the decision on the fate of the paper is never brought by the reviewers alone, but it is always the responsibility of the editor, who can give authors the opportunity to revise their manuscript regardless of the reviewer's criticism, or ask for another opinion if the quality of the review is not as high as it should be. The reviewers' opinions and editor's decision based on them should be as objective as possible, regardless of whether the reviewers' names are disclosed or not. On the other hand, a good review can bring valuable improvements to the text, as well as to the quality of authors' research, and at the same time, by opening the reviewing process and disclosing reviewers' names with their comments, reviewers would receive due credit, which could be an incentive for them to accept peer reviewing task. Considering this, it seems that the idea of open peer review attracts more attention of the editors than of the authors and the scientific community in general, although in a number of publications dealing with this mode of quality assurance some less obvious advantages are mentioned, like increasing the general discussion on scientific topics, or education of younger researchers (2) . Anyway, the number of journals that implement, or at least experiment with some kind of open peer review is slowly increasing and becoming a trend in modern publishing (3) . What changes it will bring and which problems of today's journals it will solve is yet to be seen, but it could reshape the landscape of scientific publishing a great deal. Digital publishing, abolishing printed versions of journals, and online presentation of scientific results have already changed the role of the journal remarkably. From a dissemination vehicle for research data whose creation involved technical editing of the text, quality assurance through peer reviewing, creating the layout, printing, and finally distributing the journal to libraries, it has become an institution whose role is simply to ensure credibility of data contained in a manuscript that could otherwise be processed by the authors themselves and published through an institutional repository. Indeed, what makes world's top scientific journals so appreciated is the trust of the scientific community that papers published in these journals contain facts that have been subjected to the quality assurance of highest possible scrutiny. If, however, a paper was published together with the accompanying reviews signed by the highly esteemed authorities, wouldn't it have the same scientific merit, influence and recognition as that published in a repository of a research institute or university? This would certainly simplify the dissemination process and make it cheaper, allowing more research funds to be allocated to acquiring data and less to their publishing. How scientific journals would respond and adjust to the new modes of scientific publishing remains to be seen.

V. Mrša https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3989-6938

Pros and cons of open peer review

Ten considerations for open peer review

Guidelines for open peer review implementation