Peer review types in European Association of Science Editors members’ journals: a survey study

European Science Editing 52: e182718, doi: 10.3897/ese.2026.e182718

Mario Malički^‡§|, El Mehdi Ferrouhi^¶, Hristina Prodanova^#, Seda Yilmaz Semerci^¤, Taras Kotyk^«, Siphamandla Mncube^»

‡ Stanford Program on Research Rigor and Reproducibility (SPORR), Stanford University, Stanford, United States of America§ Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), Stanford University, Stanford, United States of America| Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, Stanford University School of Medicin, Stanford, United States of America¶ Faculty of Economics and Management,Ibn Tofail University, Kénitra, Morocco# National Institute of Geophysics, Geodesy and Geography - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria¤ Department of Pediatrics, Division of Neonatology, Istinye University, Istanbul, Türkiye« Ivano-Frankivsk National Medical University, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine» Department of Information Systems, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa

Corresponding author: Mario Malički ( mario.malicki@mefst.hr )

Academic editor: Joan Marsh

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation:

Abstract

Introduction: The number or percentage of journals publishing review reports or reviewer names remains unknown in today’s scholarly milieu.

Methods: In January 2025 we sent a survey to all members of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE), followed by 2 reminder rounds, with 16 questions related to their journals, including type of peer review, availability of post-publication commenting, journal discipline, articles access type, and the manuscript submission system used by the journal. Survey responses were verified by checking the information listed on the journals’ websites.

Results: A total of 84 participants completed the survey out of the 668 emails sent (of which 83 bounced, and 125 were unopened), leading to a response rate of 14% (84 out of 585 working or non-bounced emails), or 18% (84 out of 460) if only opened emails are counted. After data cleaning, information on 71 unique journals was collected, of which only 2 described their peer review type using the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) 2023 peer review taxonomy. Of the 71 journals, one published review reports with reviewer names and one without. Four journals allowed post-publication commenting on their websites. A little over a third of the journals used the Open Journal System (n = 22, or 31%) as their submission platform, were health sciences journals (n = 23, or 32%), were published by institutional publishers (n = 25, 35%), and more than half operated as Diamond open access (n = 42, 59%).

Discussion: Only two journals in our survey published review reports alongside articles, and of the two, one published reviewer names (used open peer review) and one did not (transparent peer review). Additionally, only two journals described their peer review process on their websites using the NISO taxonomy. More research is needed to determine barriers and interventions for greater adoption of open and transparent peer review and the NISO taxonomy.

Keywords

Editors, journals, peer review, survey