I believe that some major flaws in the peer-review process are involved with anonymity. I believe our current review process opens up areas for abuse in the part of the reviewers in two main ways:
A) By knowing who the authors of a study are, the reviewers can be biased. especially if the authors are in direct competition with the reviewer's lab. Also, knowing the identity of the authors can make it harder for first time grad-students to get their work published as these people may be unfairly targeted as inexperienced based not on the merits of their science (and the models they propose) but based on their scientific status.
B) By remaining anonymous these reviewers can be far more critical to one's work without necessarily being constructive as they do not have to fear criticism from the wider scientific community for being, perhaps, too one-sided/biased.
I believe that a fair review process would be one that fosters diplomacy at all levels. This can be accomplished by either allowing both the authors of a study and the reviewers to be anonymous so that a review can focus solely on the science, or by eliminating the anonymity status from the reviewers so that the authors and the scientific community know who is reviewing what, which would prevent unfair and biased reviews.
Anonymous peer review is a good option where neither the author nor the reviewer know each other. These will prevent all sorts of unfair or biased reviews and the author would also be sure that their work is getting reviewed without any fear of biased reviewing from other research groups working in the same areas. Sometimes when submitting a paper, there is an option to indicate a non-preferred reviewer for your paper. This option can be used if you are afraid of somebody reviewing your paper and intentionally giving deliberate opinions about your research. But I personally don't prefer to give any such name as reviewer. As long as the process is anonymous (which is in most of the cases), all is well.
The current status of peer review is very disappointing. There are no safeguards against conflict of interest and reviewers misconduct.
The peer review probably can, and even should, be improved. However, the double-blind review, when the authors are unknown to reviewers and reviewers are unknown to authors, is difficult to implement because the findings of a paper submitted to a journal are often available (especially in physics, mathematics and computer science) as a preprint or a conference presentation, and then it is not too difficult for the reviewer to identify at least some of the authors. See also the related question https://www.researchgate.net/post/Do_we_need_Peer_Review_20_and_if_yes_how_should_it_differ_from_the_current_model
These is definite need to improve peer review system.
Major flaws of current system?
Inadequate review: Sometime manuscripts are sent to non-experts and in some cases even to people who are not even relevant to the field, they cannot evaluate the study properly.
Delayed publications, reviewers take too much time in review
Conflict of interest of reviewers this may also arise in the case of blind review.
Biasing of reviewers
Every activity / decision to pursue a decided task would have scope for improvement. Though I have experienced Instances of abuse of authority that antonymous reviews have shown, largely I have got good insights to improve upon. It is thus important to learn from the experience and correct the system for better and resilient outcome.
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