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. 2020 Nov 19:9:e62529.
doi: 10.7554/eLife.62529.

Journal policies and editors' opinions on peer review

Daniel G Hamilton  1 , Hannah Fraser  1 , Rink Hoekstra  2 , Fiona Fidler  1   3
Affiliations

Journal policies and editors' opinions on peer review

Daniel G Hamilton et al. Elife. .

Abstract

Peer review practices differ substantially between journals and disciplines. This study presents the results of a survey of 322 editors of journals in ecology, economics, medicine, physics and psychology. We found that 49% of the journals surveyed checked all manuscripts for plagiarism, that 61% allowed authors to recommend both for and against specific reviewers, and that less than 6% used a form of open peer review. Most journals did not have an official policy on altering reports from reviewers, but 91% of editors identified at least one situation in which it was appropriate for an editor to alter a report. Editors were also asked for their views on five issues related to publication ethics. A majority expressed support for co-reviewing, reviewers requesting access to data, reviewers recommending citations to their work, editors publishing in their own journals, and replication studies. Our results provide a window into what is largely an opaque aspect of the scientific process. We hope the findings will inform the debate about the role and transparency of peer review in scholarly publishing.

Keywords: academic publishing; data sharing; editorial policies; human; meta-research; peer review; publication ethics.

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Conflict of interest statement

DH, HF, RH, FF No competing interests declared

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Participating editors’ in principle stances on the six topics raised in Survey B.
The figures presented are limited to statements that provided a clear view for or against the topic of interest. An interactive version of this figure reporting results by discipline can be viewed at https://plotly.com/~dghamilton/9/ (Supplementary file 1). Source data for the figure can be found at https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/cy2re.
Figure 1—figure supplement 1.
Figure 1—figure supplement 1.. Survey response rate by discipline.
Figure 1—figure supplement 2.
Figure 1—figure supplement 2.. Distribution of impact factors among invited and participating journals by discipline.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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