Three ways to make peer review fairer, better and easier

Anonymity, transparency and collaboration in reviewing are all proving their worth, says Kim Eggleton

Traditional peer review, where reviewers know authors’ identities but are not revealed to them, often results in biases related to factors such as the author’s institutional affiliation, gender or reputation, hindering objective evaluation of submissions.

In an effort to remove such biases, in 2020 IOP Publishing, which is wholly owned by the Institute of Physics, became the first physics publisher to offer double-anonymous peer review across our journals, so that neither reviewers nor authors know each other’s identity.