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IOP Science

Peer review models on IOP journals

Please check the peer review model of a journal via the “About the Journal” section of our journal homepages.

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Double-anonymous peer review

How does it work?

Authors and reviewers are anonymous to each other.

What should I do if I want my work to be reviewed using double-anonymous peer review?

  • Check the journal you are submitting to supports double-anonymous peer review.
  • Authors are responsible for anonymising their manuscript before submitting their paper. Click here for more information on how to do this, including a checklist(also available in Chinese).
  • You can still share your research results via preprint servers such as arXiv and other early sharing platforms. This does mean that author identities may be easier to find online if reviewers try to find them. We ask our reviewers to undertake an objective review of an article and when agreeing to a double-anonymous review we trust that they will not go out of their way to undermine author anonymity, however this can never be guaranteed.
  • Read our double-anonymous FAQs

Single anonymous peer review

How does it work?

Reviewers are anonymous to authors. Author identities are visible to reviewers.

What should I do if I want my work to be reviewed using single-anonymous peer review?

  • Check the journal you are submitting to supports single-anonymous peer review.
  • Your manuscript should contain a complete listing of all authors, including affiliations.

Transparent peer review

How does it work?

  • The reviewer’s comments, author responses and editorial decision letters are published alongside the final published article, in citable form. The article may have been single or double anonymously peer reviewed before publication. We hope that this greater transparency will improve the quality of the review process, give more recognition to the work of reviewers and help with the teaching of best practice in peer review.

What should I do if I want to opt-in to transparent peer review?

  • Check the journal you are submitting to supports transparent peer review (it is available on all of IOP’s fully Open Access journals).
  • Both authors and reviewers can opt-out of transparent peer review should they wish to do so. The peer review history will only appear for articles where the author and (all) reviewers opt in. Reviewers who do opt-in can still choose to remain anonymous.

What does transparent peer review look like?

The peer review history is available only for articles displaying a Publons badge (above) at the top of the article (next to the title). Click on the badge to view further information. All peer review content displayed will be covered by a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license.

Some example articles published with transparent peer review content are available here:

Post publication review

While we do not have any functionality on our site for post-publication review, we welcome comments on published work. This could be via social media (many of our journals have their own Twitter accounts, for example), or via an external website such as PubPeer. Some of our journals publish comments on previously published work. Check your journal instructions for more information.