Six months of Transparent Peer Review at SAGE

By Katrina Pickersgill

Earlier this year SAGE announced a partnership with Clarivate to offer transparent peer review on four of our journals. This year’s Peer Review Week, dedicated to the theme “Identity in Peer Review”, is the perfect time to reflect on the results we’ve seen so far.

All papers submitted to Therapeutic Advances in Respiratory Disease, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, Clinical Medicine Insights: Pediatrics and Neuroscience Insights since March 1st 2021 are eligible for transparent peer review. Where authors and/or reviewers opt in, exchanges between editors, peer reviewers and authors will accompany published articles, opening the window into the peer review process from submission to publication. This helps authors to demonstrate that their manuscript has been through rigorous peer review and allows reviewers and editors an alternative way to gain credit for their work.

Having now offered this option for 6 months, we have reviewed uptake from both authors and reviewers.

Transparent Peer Review Author & Reviewer opt-in rates March 1st – August 31st 2021

*Authors cannot opt-out

**Reviewers cannot opt-out, but can decline to have their name included alongside their review

There are variances in how each journal offers transparent peer review. Having previously adopted a mandatory open peer review model for Therapeutic Advances in Respiratory Disease, we decided that transparent peer review would be the default policy for this journal going forward. Authors are therefore not given the option to opt-out. However, even when omitting mandatory participation from the author opt-in stats, uptake has been encouragingly high, with 84% of submitting authors choosing to participate.

For three of the journals, we also chose to make reviewer participation mandatory. While we acknowledge that there may still be legitimate concerns from reviewers about the potential ramifications of identifying themselves, we felt that it was important to transparently display as full a peer review history as possible alongside each paper. We are pleased to see that nearly two thirds of Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science reviewers have chosen to participate when given the choice.

For all four journals, reviewers are given the option to opt-out of having their name published alongside their review. On average, just over 40% of reviewers have opted to sign their name against their comments. This is an increase of 8% from when we last assessed this in June, a positive sign that reticence is decreasing. Therapeutic Advances in Respiratory Disease has offered reviewers this choice since January 2019, and its slightly higher uptake rate may suggest that the reviewing community for this journal is becoming more familiar and/or comfortable with these practises.

Many of the papers eligible for transparent peer review are still being peer reviewed or awaiting publication. However, we are pleased to share an example of one of the first SAGE papers published with an accompanying transparent peer review history. The review reports, author responses and editor decision letters, are each assigned their own Digital Object Identifier (DOI), ensuring that all review materials are fully citable and attributable.  

We’re delighted with the success of the program thus far and look forward to seeing more transparent peer review records published soon.

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