Open peer review in Janeway

By MPE

My (MPE’s) weekend hacking activity was to build out open peer review in Janeway. That is, like in F1000’s system, the ability for reviewers to consent to their reviews being shared alongside the published article.

While this sounds like a major structural change, because of Janeway’s architecture it was actually pretty easy to do. It took 2hrs 45 minutes. The first thing I did was to add a setting to every journal that allows the editor to enable or disable open peer review.

The new option in Janeway to enable or disable open peer review

When this mode is enabled, reviewers are presented with a checkbox, at review time, to signal whether they are willing to have their review and name made public. The editor dashboard now shows the “public/open” status of peer review reports.

The editor dashboard showing an open review

When it now comes to publishing an article, the open peer review option adds another item to the pre-publication checklist: open review. Clicking this option gives the editor the choice of consenting reviews that are to be displayed alongside an article.

The select reviews stage of prepublication

A review that can be selected

From there, once the article is published, all themes now show public peer review reports in the sidebar.

The newly revamped peer review pane

Clicking on the “Accept” link in the sidebar — which changes to reflect the actual decision, of course — displays the full review data in a popup modal.

A sample pop up modal showing an open peer review

Quick and simple but a valuable change that I suspect many of our journals will value.

— Martin Paul Eve