Yesterday a new medical journal was launched, Open Medicine. It's the product of Drs. John Hoey and Anne Marie Todkill, former editors of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, who were fired last year in a conflict over editorial independence. Their publisher, the Canadian Medical Association, tried to exert editorial direction and the editors resisted. It was, as they say, un scandale.
The editors have risen, souls and reputations intact. Moreover, OM will be joining the growing ranks of Open Access journals with open review policies:
Open Medicine is a new general medical journal. It will be paperless and available without charge or any other barrier to access online. We will publish peer-reviewed science and analysis as well as clinical articles. We will provide a forum for informed and inclusive debates on medicine and its application. Open Medicine will be independent of any commercial publisher or association ownership -- it will be "owned" by all who read and contribute to it -- and will take no advertisements from companies selling pharmaceuticals or medical devices. We will rely on voluntarism, donations and ethical advertising. Any revenue will be used to improve our ability to meet the needs of our readers and contributors.This first edition of Open Medicine offers carefully reviewed and edited articles for discovery and discussion. In the future, it is our intention to make the journal not only open, but also collaborative. As an example, the editors considered the merits of publishing peer reviews along with accepted papers, and began reviewing the published evidence on the effectiveness of open peer review. (James Maskalyk, writing for the Editors in Open Medicine)
I have been co-Editor in Chief of a successful Open Access scientific journal for several years. Open access works and benefits everyone. Open review has produced better and more constructive reviews by assent of both reviewers and authors. I am thrilled to see another major journal adopt these policies.
The Reveres wish Open Medicine the greatest of success. Take a look. It's free and unencumbered by competing interests.
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So are the names of the reviewers published, or just their reviews? I've often heard making reviewers' names public discussed, but have never heard a good answer to the obvious criticism. If a paper is authored by influential people, and you are a less-established reviewer with serious criticisms to make, how can you ensure that you do not suffer if you make them? (Not necessarily through deliberate vindictiveness, but just through the generally negative associations with your name which will involuntarily be formed in the minds of the authors and their friends)? I would not relish, as a journal editor, the task of finding reviewers for such a paper who were *both* qualified *and* too well established to fear such problems. [One might answer that if only the reviews from accepted papers are published, the problem does not apply, but IME it does happen that, say, 2 reviewers are strongly in favour and one has (reasonable) criticisms, and the final decision is to publish. What does happen to rejected papers in their system, anyway? Do the authors see the reviewers' names?]
Maybe publishing the reviews but not the reviewers' names is actually the answer? It would at least demonstrate that a serious review process had actually happened, which would be good. If that's actually what's planned here that would be interesting.
In our journal the reviewer's and authors' names are known to each other and the reviews are available, with names, as "pre publication history" to anyone on the website, although they are not automatically downloaded with the paper (you have to separately click on prepub history to get the reviews). While the inhibiting effects you suggest are always possible, in practice it hasn't worked out that way, and we have been doing open reviews for almost 5 years. The open review format encourages reviewers to write reviews that are constructive, not denigrating or nasty, and substantive, since they know others can see them. In all that time I have had 3 potential reviewers refuse to review because of open review, and they were all people who had no experience doing open reviews. The unanimous verdict of reviewers and authors who have expressed any opnion at all is that open reivews are much better than the more traditional variety in terms of being thorough, conscientious, constructive and honest. It eliminates reviews like, "This is a great paper" and "This paper sucks" in favor of actual substantive comments. While there may be some possible down sides, the balance weighs heavily in favor of open review, IMO, and I have a lot of experience with both kinds.
Very interesting, thanks.