One criticism of traditional peer review is that a reader does not know who the reviewers were, and so cannot judge whether they had sufficient expertise to assess the manuscript, thus meaning the stamp of ‘peer reviewed’ is of uncertain value. Although transparent review does not fully address this, since the reader still will not know the reviewers’ identities, the reader will be able to read the comments and assess whether the reviewer has made sensible and reasonable criticism of the work, which should lead to increased confidence in the peer-review assessment. Fully open review would be even better from this point of view, but many reviewers may be reluctant to associate their names with negative reviews, even when the negative comments are justified, for fear of retaliation. It seems to us that transparent review is currently the best compromise, and we hope that, when it is well established, it will foster a more open environment where reviewers will feel more comfortable in revealing their identities.

Therefore, we feel that transparent review will be the right choice for the journal. Our results suggest some authors might be reluctant to submit under those circumstances, but we nevertheless feel that the benefits of transparent review outweigh a possible small drop in submissions. We will be making this move permanently: after 1 January 2019, all submissions will be reviewed transparently. By doing this, we join an increasing number of journals that are adopting transparency. Recently, editors from over 100 journals from a variety of publishers signed an open letter committing to move to transparent review [3]. We are excited about joining them.

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https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-018-1584-0?utm_source=other&utm_medium=other&utm_content=null&utm_campaign=BSCN_2_DD_GenBio_TPP_Scinet

期刊介绍:

Genome Biology（https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/，13.2 -2-year Impact Factor, 16.5 - 5-year Impact Factor） publishes outstanding research in all areas of biology and biomedicine studied from a genomic and post-genomic perspective.

（来源：科学网）

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