ScienceOpen, which promotes Pluto journals and offers them peer review facilities (among much else), has just requested that Prometheus change its submission system from single-blind peer review to double-blind peer review. This would mean that neither referees nor authors would know the identity of the other. On the face of it, this increased anonymity makes the peer review process fairer and more efficient. The single-blind system long used by Prometheus allows the referee to remain anonymous while knowing the identity of the author. Prometheus is a niche journal and a referee with no idea who had written the paper she was reading (or could not ask Google) was probably insufficiently familiar with the subject to write a decent report. Double-blind peer review seemed only to mask this reality. While double-blind peer review is fashionable in the social sciences and humanities, the sciences generally lean towards single-blind peer review, presumably because they, like Prometheus, value expertise above anonymity.

PAGES
383 – 384
DOI
All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Issues
Also in this issue:
-
Ryan Jenkins, David Černý and Tomáš Hříbek (eds) Autonomous Vehicle Ethics: The Trolley Problem and Beyond
-
As open as possible, but as closed as necessary: openness in innovation policy
-
Turning sportswashing against sportswashers: an unconventional perspective
-
State secrets and compromises with capitalism: Lev Theremin and regimes of intellectual property
-
In search of an author