Reviewers' ratings on three evaluation criteria and the reviewers' final publication recommendations were available for 552 manuscripts (in total 1145 reviews) that were submitted to Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, an interactive open access journal using public peer review (authors' and reviewers' comments are publicly exchanged).
Most other journals pursuing public peer review do not prescribe publication of formal ratings either, and some of them explicitly instruct reviewers not to include formal ratings in their public comments (see, e.g., http://adv-model-earth-syst.org/index.php/JAMES/about/faq).org/index.php/JAMES/about/faq
Previous studies have compared quality of reviewer reports under open and single-blind peer review across various journals, 1 and analysed open peer review, 2 public peer review, 3 the proportion of authors who suggested reviewers 4 and differences between recommendations by reviewers who were either suggested or excluded by the authors.
ACP initiator and Chief Executive Editor Ulrich Pöschl of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, argued in July 2012 that journals with public peer review, like ACP, tend to receive manuscripts that are better prepared and so need less work.
"[A]nticipation of public peer review and discussion deters authors from submitting low-quality manuscripts and, thus, relieves editors and referees from spending too much time on deficient submissions," he wrote.
With better informational resources, the Patent and Trademark Office could offer patent applicants who know they have significant inventions the option of a rigorous and public peer review that would produce a "gold-plated" patent much less vulnerable to court challenge.
Public peer review is supposed to bring a new openness to the reviewing process that will enhance its objectivity.
Even if all studies so far have found that Ra rate manuscripts systematically more favorably than Re, it would be expected that public peer review at ACP does not show this effect.
Using modern information technology, in particular the Internet, the ACP and other interactive open access journals have now become established in science that work with a "new" system of public peer review [18], [19].
In this study we aim to test whether there is a potential source of bias in the manuscript reviewing in public peer review at an interactive open access journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP), through the use of Ra and Re.
