Authors will now be able to opt for double-blind peer review across Nature and the Nature Research Journals. Nature Publishing Group's flagship open access journal, Nature Communications, will be joining the trial later in 2015. The news is announced in an editorial published in this week's Nature, with other journals announcing their implementation over the coming month. Double-blind peer review is being introduced in response to author feedback, and follows trials by Nature Geoscience and Nature Climate Change.
In double-blind peer review both the authors and the reviewers are anonymised. The Nature-branded journals will also continue to offer single-blind peer review, in which the reviewers are anonymous but know the authors' identity. Corresponding authors will be able to choose whether single-blind or double-blind peer review is used on their submission. Advocates of double-blind peer review argue that it removes biases that relate to the authors (for example those based on gender, seniority or organisation) that might otherwise impact the objectivity with which the review is carried out.
Nature Geoscience and Nature Climate Change began offering a double-blind peer review option in June 2013. Authors of about 20 percent of submissions chose the option, no substantive effects on the quality of reviews have been detected and support for the trial remains very high. A recent Nature Publishing Group reader survey found that 78 percent of almost 29,000 respondents thought that double-blind peer review was a 'good' or 'very good' idea and many in-person interviews with young scientists confirmed that researchers wanted to see double-blind peer review as an option.
