Attitudes to open peer review among stakeholders of a scholarly-led journal in Brazil

Abstract

Scholarly journals should consider the attitudes of their communities before adopting any of the seven traits of open peer review. Unfortunately, surveys from the Global North might not generalize to the Global South, where double-blind peer review is commonplace even among journals on natural sciences and medicine. This paper reports the findings of a survey on attitudes to open peer review among four stakeholder groups of a scholarly-led medical journal in Brazil: society members and journal readers, authors, and reviewers. Compared to a previous survey recruiting mostly researchers on natural sciences from Europe, this survey found similar support to open peer review in general and for most of its traits. One important exception was open identities, which were considered detrimental by most participants, even more so in this survey than in the previous one. Interestingly, participants were not so dismissive of open identities when expressing whether they agreed with statements about its specific consequences. Because preprints are increasingly popular but incompatible with double-blind review, future research should examine the effects of transitioning from double-blind to open identities, especially on gender bias. Meanwhile, scholarly journals with double-blind review might prefer to begin by adopting other traits of open review or to make open identities optional at first.