- Starting in March, Nature and the monthly Nature Research Journals will experiment with an alternative to their time-tested method of peer review. Instead of the traditional single-blind method, in which reviewers are anonymous but know the authors' identity, authors will be able to choose double-blind peer review, in which both authors and reviewers are unknown to each other.
Wonder if they'll make the blinded-ness public info at the point of publication.
It's funny that they don't discuss the reasoning behind authors declining double-blind. If you are an influential name in the field, double-blind works against you. For that reason, double-blind shouldn't be an option. It doesn't correct for bias sought by the author that works in the author's favor. Of course, double-blind can't be perfect, but it is an improvement upon a process that is fraught with the influence of personal bias. The degree of voluntary participation is a poor measure, scientific quality is what we are after.Since June 2013, Nature Geoscience and Nature Climate Change have allowed authors to choose between double-blind and single-blind peer review at submission; early results from this trial have been described and discussed (Nat. Nanotechnol. 9, 871–872, 2014). In short, the uptake of the double-blind method has been much lower than the enthusiasm expressed in surveys would have predicted—no more than a fifth of monthly submissions are going the double-blind route—but no substantial effects on the quality of reviews have been detected.
Not so easy, actually. How do you write a manuscript that's completely detached from your previous work, of which it is probably an extension? It seems like to make this even possible, one has to only speak in passive voice, and not ever highlight one's previous accomplishments, accomplishments that likely give the manuscript credibility (not based on authorship, but on continuity). Nothing is published in a vacuum. I think this is commendable in theory, but will be very difficult to execute. We all have biases, and I will admit that if a paper comes across my desk from someone who I have a lot of respect for, as happens on occasion, I probably tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. I like to think that the opposite isn't true, however, that I am intentionally harsh to anyone who I don't know. Who knows? At least being cognizant of bias can help to limit it.The responsibility for rendering the manuscript anonymous falls to the authors.
If there's anywhere that bias needs to be reduced, it's in the grant awarding process. I'm not entirely sure how big a deal it is in publishing. I'm sure it exists, but eventually, if your paper is good, it's going to get out there, even if it's not in the top impact journals. In this day and age, what's the difference. As long as I can read an article and judge it on my own, I could not possibly care less who publishes it. Remember, the Lancet is the journal that published that rubbish about vaccines and autism. Meanwhile, plenty of high quality research is published in journals whose impact factor is ~2. The grants thing is way easier said than done.
My old mentor said a similar thing, of the need to blind authors and journals during grant approval (on the topic of publishing in eLife / PLOS). Later I heard a professor claim that the NIH already does something along those lines, but I was never able to find a primary source to confirm that... (annoying, my search results were drowned out by grants relating to blindness in the visual sense)