We have migrated to transparent and toughest ‘Advanced OPEN peer review’ system (Detailed general information is available in this link). High quality manuscripts are peer-reviewed by minimum two peers of the same field. OPEN peer review system provides the provision to reveal the identities of the authors and reviewers to each other during review process. In order to add transparency further, details of all reviewers and academic editors are published in the first page of every published paper (in the Article Information section: see example). As a final step to provide highest level transparency in the process, all review comments, authors’ feedbacks, all versions of the manuscript and editorial comments are published (along with date) with the paper in ‘Review History’ link (See example 1, example 2, example 3, etc). This transparent process will help to eradicate any possible malicious/purposeful interference by any person (publishing staff, reviewer, editor, author, etc) during peer review. As a result of this unique system all reviewers will get their due recognition and respect, once their names are published with the papers (Example Link). If reviewers do not want to reveal their identities, we will honour that request. In that case only the review reports will be published as ‘anonymous reviewer report’.
Additionally ‘Advanced OPEN peer review’ greatly helps in ‘continuity and advancement of science’. We strongly believe that all the files related to peer review of a manuscript are valuable and hold an important place in the continuity and advancement of science. If publishers publish the peer review reports along with published papers, this process can result in savings of thousands of hours of future authors during experiments, manuscript preparation, etc. by minimizing the common errors after reading these previously published peer review reports. Therefore, as per our new official policy update, if the manuscript is published, all peer review reports will be available to the readers. All files (like original manuscript, comments of the reviewers, revised manuscript, and editorial comment (if any)) related to the peer review, will be available in “Review history” link along with the published paper (Example Link).
Additionally we believe that one of the main objectives of peer review system is ‘to improve the quality of a candidate manuscript’. Normally we try to publish the ‘average marks (out of 10)’ a manuscript received at initial peer review stage and at final publication stage to record its history of improvement during peer review. This process further increases the transparency. It is more important to record honestly the ‘strength and weakness of a manuscript’ than claiming that ‘our peer review system is perfect’. Therefore, these transparent processes (i.e. publication of review history files and scores of a particular manuscript) additionally give a clear idea of the strength and weakness of a published paper to the readers, which enhances the chances of proper use of the result of a research (and or reduces the chances of misuse of the weakness of the findings of the paper). Thus this transparent process may prove to be highly beneficial for the society in long run.
