Annals of Forest Science is supporting an in-depth transition towards the practices of Open Science. After developing Open Data procedures (Data Papers and availability of data associated to published manuscripts), we moved to full open access to the contents (gold open access) by January 2022.
We now would like to tackle the question of Open Peer Review, which is a much more sensitive issue. Peer review, i.e., the critical analysis of manuscripts by peers aimed at checking the scientific validity of the presented results and at ensuring their reproducibility, is at the heart of the scientific process. It consists in a contradictory debate about results and their interpretation. Our current peer review procedure is based on a double-blind approach, meaning that during the review and potential revision process, the reviewers do not know the identity of the authors, and the authors do not know that of the reviewers. Only the handling editor is known to everybody and acts under full transparency.
While moving to open peer review we wish to keep this double-blind approach to peer review, at least up to the final acceptance of the manuscript. At that stage, there are two options:
The manuscript is not accepted for publication, and the reviews remain hidden, as well as the names of the reviewers. In practice, the reviewers are informed about the identity of the authors when they receive a copy of the final decision; in the case of open peer review, this will not change. Anyway, reviewers might get credit for the reviews they produced (which is important for the track record of their activities), but the text of the review is not made public and the identity of the reviewers remains hidden.The manuscript is accepted for publication, and the reviews may be made available to anyone with a DOI in a public repository. We chose the French Open Science repository HAL for convenience, as all the papers published by Annals of Forest Science are already deposited on HAL. The editorial board would be in charge of this procedure. HAL would display the reviews, archive them and produce a link and a citation that would be produced in the published paper. This would help keep track of the debates that were raised during the reviewing, and contribute to a more transparent process. Again, two options here:The review is signed by the authors of the review;The review remains anonymous.
Some journals or editing platforms like “Peer Community in Forest&Wood Sciences” (as well as all other Peer Communities) already use such a procedure and make it compulsory, the only option being that of displaying or not the identity of the reviewers (based on the free choice by the reviewers individually).
Annals of Forest Science opted for an optional Open Peer Review, e.g., the authors are asked whether they are willing to have their manuscript undergo an Open Peer review, and the potential Peers would be asked also if they wish to contribute and sign their review (or remain anonymous).
Advantages of the Open Peer Review procedure:
Increase the transparency of the review process and therefore the trust in what is published;Make some scientific debates and controversies more visible;Provide more credit and visibility to the reviewers and their highly valuable contribution to science;Increase the quality of the reviews (we would provide templates to guide the reviewers in what they need to state).
Cons to the Open Peer Review Procedure:
An open peer review might require more work and more attention (hence increased quality).
The review report and its history will be wrapped-up by the editorial board into a unique Portable Peer Review report transferred to the French open science platform HAL. The PPR report format must conform to quality standards defined by the editorial board. Annals of Forest Science chose a format with enhanced DOI metadata, cross citation and licensing (CC-BY).