The Royal Society of Chemistry has announced that its journal ChemComm will continue offering authors the option for double-blind peer review, after a trial over the past 12 months.
ChemComm publishes 100 issues per year, and is known for being the fastest publisher of articles providing information on new avenues of chemical research. In July 2017 the journal began offering authors a choice in how their manuscript was peer reviewed. Upon submission, authors had the option to use single-blind or double-blind peer review.
Under the more traditional single-blind option, reviewers remain anonymous, but they are able to see the identity of the authors. Under the double-blind option, the authors keep their identity hidden from the reviewers.
During the trial they found that 10 percent of ChemComm authors chose the double-blind option at submission, with an above average number of these authors being from India and Iran. The USA, Japan, Germany and the UK on the other hand all showed a less than 5 percent uptake.
One challenge of the process is that authors are responsible for anonymising their own manuscripts, and it was found, during the trial, that in many case this was not done fully. The journal is exploring ways of improving this process in order to ensure a higher rate of anonymity.
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