SELECTIVE TRANSPARENCY IN OPEN PEER REVIEW: A LARGE-SCALE POLICY AUDIT
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18623/rvd.v22.n7.3975Keywords:
Open Peer Review, Scholarly Publishing Governance, Transparency, Metadata, Research EvaluationAbstract
Open peer review (OPR) is increasingly framed as a governance reform for improving transparency, accountability, and trust in scholarly publishing. Yet, evidence on how OPR is implemented in practice remains uneven across disciplines, publishers, and specific OPR components. This paper synthesizes findings from a recent large-scale audit of OPR implementation and re-expresses all results using a standardized reporting base of 1,000 journals and 10,000 sampled articles for interpretability and cross-study comparison. The evidence indicates that OPR adoption is geographically and institutionally concentrated—especially in Europe and among large commercial publishers—and is most prevalent in medicine and health sciences. Core OPR elements, such as mandatory reviewer identity disclosure and mandatory publication of peer review reports, remain uncommon and are typically implemented as optional features. A major implementation bottleneck is standardization: while most publicly available peer review reports provide multi-round process visibility, nearly all lack persistent identifiers (e.g., DOI), limiting citability and the possibility of reviewer credit. We translate these patterns into policy recommendations for journals, publishers, funders, and infrastructure providers, focusing on "default-open with safeguards," persistent identifiers for review objects, and incentive alignment to make open review sustainable.
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