Open review is the most collaborative and public method of managing the review process.
Alongside this and the two traditional types of peer review (single-blind and double-blind), several experimental processes are underway that also aim to disseminate their outcomes:
- Published review (transparent peer review), where the judgments of reviewers, the responses of authors, and the decisions of editors are published alongside the work accepted for publication;
- Collaborative review, where a group of people work together on the review (for example, two or more reviewers can collaborate on examining the work, discussing it and drafting a shared judgment, or one or more reviewers can collaborate with the author to improve their proposal to make it publishable);
- Post-publication peer review, where evaluation and review occur after publication, for instance, through a comment page or a discussion forum linked to the work;
- Cascading peer review, where the review determines that a work is not suitable for publication at its current editorial venue and, with the author's consent, the work and the review report are transferred to a more suitable editorial venue.
The optimal open peer review, as illustrated by Tony Ross-Hellauer in the article “What is open peer review? A systematic review”, exhibits the following seven characteristics: mutual knowledge of the identities of the involved parties, the publication of review reports, the expansion of the community involved in the process, collaboration among parties during its execution, the immediate sharing of unrefereed pre-prints, the possibility to comment on the editorial version, and the management of the review by an independent organization from both the author and the publisher.
Open review therefore offers significant advantages in terms of:
- Transparency of the process, thanks to the knowledge of the identities of authors and reviewers;
- Speed in making research results accessible; • Reliability, as broadening the pool of reviewers and constructive discussion allow for better identification of methodological flaws or other inconsistencies;
- Consistency of acceptance or rejection criteria for a proposal, thanks to direct comparison among multiple reviewers;
- In-depth understanding of research methodologies and processes employed, thanks to public interactions between reviewers and authors;
- Motivation, as the work carried out by reviewers gains visibility and can itself be cited.
The adoption of open peer review has so far also been hindered by technological limitations, specifically the absence of platforms that allow for the management of a fully public and collaborative review process.