Does the use of open, non-anonymous peer review in scholarly publishing introduce bias? Evidence from the F1000Research post-publication open peer review publishing model

As part of moves towards open knowledge practices, making peer review open is cited as a way to enable fuller scrutiny and transparency of assessments around research. There are now many flavours of open peer review in use across scholarly publishing, including where reviews arefully attributable and the reviewer is named.This study examines whether there is any evidence of bias in two areas of common critique of open, non-anonymous (named) peer review - and used in the post-publication, peer review system operated by the open-access scholarly publishing platform F1000Research.First, is there evidence of potential bias where a reviewer based in a specific country assesses the work of an author also based in the same country?Second, are reviewers influenced by being able to see the comments and know the origins of a previous reviewer? Based on over 4 years of open peer review data, we found some weak evidence that being based in the same country as an author may influence a reviewer's decision, while there was insufficient evidence to conclude that being able to read an existing published reviewpriorto submitting a review encourages conformity. Thus, while immediate publishing of peer review reports appears to be unproblematic, caution may be needed when selecting same-country reviewers in open systems if other studies confirm these results.

Automated summary

This study examines potential biases in open, non-anonymous peer review, specifically looking at whether reviewers based in the same country as authors and the influence of seeing previous reviewers' comments are factors. The research found weak evidence that same-country reviewers may be influenced by authors' nationality, but insufficient evidence to support the idea that seeing previous reviews encourages conformity. Caution may be needed in selecting same-country reviewers in open systems, pending further studies to confirm these results.