We are pleased to offer an optional open peer review to the community in forest and wood sciences to whom Annals of Forest Science is dedicated. Based on new digital technologies and public infrastructure registration, we set up a process that is consistent with the values and ethics of our community. This led us to make the choice to separate the review report from the actual article. The publication venues are the French national repository HAL for the review report (under a CC-BY license) and the BMC platform for the article (as usual for the article).

How the open peer review process works ?

The process starts with a closed peer review until final acceptance. Once the article is published on the BMC platform (https://annforsci.biomedcentral.com/) then the peer review report, edited by the journal’s editors, is published openly on the French repository HAL (https://hal.science/) and cross-referencing enables quick, reliable and permanent links. Reviewers can choose whether or not to disclose their identity and to connect activity to the reviewer profile with ORCID for credit and career evaluation. If the article is rejected, no report is published.

The process is optional: both authors and reviewers have to agree before the reviews are published.

Authors guidelines in 5 steps

1. While you submit your manuscript, include in your cover letter a statement of your willingness to follow the open peer review model ;

2. Submit your manuscript through Editorial Manager (as usual with reviewers’ names suggestions, title page separated from manuscript, cover-letter, …) ;

3. The manuscript will undergo a double-blind review: the editor assigns two anonymous reviewers who agree that the evaluation report might be published. The names of the authors and reviewers are hidden at this stage ;

4. When your manuscript is accepted for publication the reviewers’ reports and authors’ responses are wrapped-up into a single report including the editor decisions with a CC-BY license and a DOI. The reviewers are free to disclose their names, affiliation and ORCID if they wish so ;

5. In parallel to the publication of the article on the BMC platform, the report is openly published on the French repository HAL, for anyone to read. A Cross-linking enables accessibility between report and published article, in both publications.

Flow chart of the handling of a manuscript with open peer review

The flow chart for handling a manuscript and the review report publication process (in purple) are presented in the figure below. The manuscript will be handled in the Editorial Manager platform with no change (except that we need the agreement of authors and reviewers to produce the review report). The only addendum would be :

1. The production by the editorial team of the review report and its deposition into HAL (and the link to the ORCID identifier of the reviewers whenever possible and wished by the reviewers);
2. The addition of the reference link to the review report in the published version of the paper.

CRediT Authorship and Contributorship contribution statement

Marianne Peiffer : Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5326-3590

Sabine Arbeille, Véronique Lesage, Valérie Pagneux, Vincent Rappeneau : Data curation

For correspondence : marianne.peiffer@inrae.fr

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Erwin Dreyer for helpful discussion

How to quote this post : Marianne Peiffer, Sabine Arbeille, Véronique Lesage, Valérie Pagneux, Vincent Rappeneau. Open peer review in Annals of Forest Science as a new option. 2024. ⟨hal-04511778⟩