Not all peer-reviewing is single-blind. Some journals (as well as conferences) go for the double-blind processes, others release all information. Recently I reviewed several papers for a journal that reveals everything, i.e. you name and your comments, publicly.

Additionally, even if you have a double blind process, if the presented work is from your field, and considering the references people use, you mind know the author even without his/her name written on the paper. To some extend, the same applies if you receive a review.

Now to the original question, each reviewer should be fair and honest enough. This holds for judging content independent of the original author, but also for flagging conflicts of interest (for which you should know the author names). Please note that this second statement does not contradict the above, but other people might later question the credibility of a review if they realize it was done by a colleague of one of the writers.

For all of these reasons, I am very much in favor of the above mentioned case, i.e. revealing all information publicly. From what I experienced, this is a good mean to quality assurance by counter measure - in a time where many reviewers seem to spend just a few minutes on very valuable papers. Ultimately, this gives also credibility and reputation to the reviewer him/herself.

Sven, thank you very much for your answer. Obviously my question was biased with respect to my background, I dont know one journal in my field doing what you described, but I think I am also in favor of the release of all relevant information afterwards, although one has to wonder if then many reviewers would still consider to act as a reviewer. i dont think this will be widely accepted.

That each reviewer should be fair and honest enough certainly true, but not necessarily the case, in particular when it comes to reviewing project proposals.

The argument that you realize who has written the paper from the references is the "standard" argument to my question. However, clearly there is a difference whether you know who wrote/referred a/your paper or whether you make an adjucated guess. As a reviewer, it is probably not difficult to phrase critique so that the authors may be pointed to somebody else but you. Same applies to authoring a paper.

Also, I would hope for wide acceptance of open review - maybe even with allowing others to comment -, but indeed this might remain wishful thinking.

Project proposals are indeed another story. I did not think of that in my answer above. In such cases, the involved organizations and ideally - as much as it can be stated - individuals have to be known at some point in order to judge the credibility and competences of the consortium, i.e. a completely double -blind review cannot work. In addition, it would be ideal to know the reviewers (once the proposal has been evaluated) in order to ensure fair treatment and no 'lobbying'.

Of course I raised the "standard" argument, and in holds. Beyond that, I would not recommend anybody to try to write in a way as somebody else would do. In the end, all of this work is about your contribution to the scientific and you should not get side-tracked. Writing in a neutral way is a different story, and certainly valuable. Some (single- or double-blind) journals, for example, include related instructions in their templates and author guidelines, such that no pointers to the authors appear in the document version for review... and I assume they check those points before forwarding!

I think for project proposals it may be feasible to do the following. Double-blind or open evaluation to review the scientific merit of the project and single-blind or open review to evaluate the "fitness" of the applicant(s) to perform the projected research, without regard to the scientific quality of the proposal.

I think the majority of researchers are trying to guess anyways who were their reviewers, and certainly some reviewers tend to give themselves aways, if only simply saying: please include this and that paper in the citations. Typically these are papers by one single group of researchers. This maybe be unique in my line of work, but its certainly to rare to occur. If its true that you can guess who wrote a paper, it is certainly typically also true that you can guess who wrote a review, and sometimes not a lot of guessing involved. I still think the "standard" argument does not hold, or at least not generally.

I just found an interesting paper on the subject, published in Nature in 2008: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7179/full/451605b.html#B1

Thanks, Olivier!

There is a blog attached to the article posted by Olivier (http://blogs.nature.com/peer-to-peer/2008/02/working_doubleblind.html) which I find quite interesting. I have just counted post pro, contra and undecided or favoring something else like double-open peer review. The vast majority of bloggers (35) supports double-blind, only 2(!) oppose it and 16 are undecided or favor open peer review, with reviewers names made public after publication (not counting blog posts by editors). I still find all arguments put forward to date in favor of single blind review weak, unconvincing or irrelevant, at best. One particular good and well-argued blog post (in my opinion) is the one of B. Kamenov (Feb 07 2008 22:00 GMT) and their follow-ups.

Sorry to join in so late.

As an editor of one journal and associate editor of several other journals (operations research area) I might have another point of view which might be interesting and adds to the really interesting discussion.

When I was an author I favored double-blind. As a matter of fact, I created a journal (http://www.inderscience.com/ejie) with other fellow co-editors and then we selected double-blind.

A few years later I favor now single-blind. Why?

Well, first of all, most of the time it is very easy, for a paper in your area or specific topic, to guess the authors' names. So this defeats the purpose of double-blind in the first place.

Second, if referees know the names of the authors, they can much better compare previous work and check for substantial contributions instead of incremental contributions which are the scourge of our field.

Additionally, plagiarism detection systems like Ithenticate and others work much better if one supplies the names of the authors.

In a nutshell, I am happier letting my referees know the names of the authors.

Of course, the downside could be biased reports and animadversion from referees to authors but that does not concern me. I read in detail all referee reports. After all, a report has to be well motivated and if a referee does not like an author he/she better find strong scientific arguments to reject the paper.

So after all, higher quality is, in my most humble opinion, achieved with single-blind review process and the potential evils of single-blind review are minimized with attentive editors and with the right of rebuttal form the authors.