What Transparent Peer Review Really Changes

Transparent peer review has become the industry’s latest approach towards openness – a promise that publishing decisions are no longer made behind closed doors. But as more journals adopt it, the question isn’t only how it works; it’s what it really changes for editors, reviewers, and authors inside the system.

For most of its history, peer review has taken place behind a polite wall of confidentiality. Editors wrote to reviewers, reviewers wrote to authors, authors revised in silence, and the published paper arrived cleansed of the messy conversation that shaped it. Such privacy was functional, not furtive: it existed to protect candour. Yet it also produced a paradox: the process meant to guarantee transparency in research remained opaque in its own workings.

In the past few years, a new vocabulary has entered editorial corridors – transparent peer review, open reports, published reviews. What began as cautious trials has become a quiet re-engineering of editorial systems. For example, Nature’s move this summer to make transparent review standard for all new research papers has signalled something bigger: openness is no longer an experiment; it is becoming an expectation [1].

What ‘Transparent’ Actually Means

‘Transparent’ – We use the term freely, but few people define it the same way. Some journals now publish the reviewers’ reports and the authors’ responses alongside accepted articles [2]. Others release only the decision letters or summary statements. A smaller number reveal reviewer identities; most keep them hidden. The common thread is visibility: allowing readers to see how an article was evaluated, not just that it was.

It’s important to remember that this isn’t the same as open peer review. Openness can mean having named reviewers, engaging in public discussion, or allowing open participation before publication. Transparency, by contrast, usually refers to the publication of the review records themselves – reports, responses, and decision letters – after acceptance. It’s a subtle but crucial distinction: one concerns who speaks; the other, who can listen.

In open peer review, the focus is on who speaks: reviewers and sometimes authors are named, so identities are open. The process reveals who is doing the talking.
In transparent peer review, the focus is on who can listen: the review reports and author responses are made public. Hence, the content of the discussion is visible, even if the participants remain anonymous.

Why Editors Are Moving Towards TPR

From within the editorial world, the shift has less to do with ideology and more to do with trust. Studies of journal adoption show the same pattern: the motivation is pragmatic, improving fairness, transparency, and trust, rather than ideological (Ross-Hellauer et al., Research Evaluation, 2023) [3].

Editors know the criticisms: peer review is slow, inconsistent, and sometimes unfair. Publishing the review trail lets readers see the rigour of the process and the evolution of the paper. It shows that rejection or acceptance was reasoned, not arbitrary. As Nature put it when announcing its policy, the aim was to ‘increase readers’ trust in published research and show the rigour of our editorial process’ – not to make a political statement about openness.[1]

For authors, transparent review can also demystify the system. Seeing how others’ papers were discussed – what reviewers questioned, what revisions mattered – gives clearer expectations for their own submissions. Reviewers, meanwhile, gain a form of recognition. Even if their names remain hidden, their intellectual work becomes visible and citable, no longer confined to a confidential file that disappears once the paper is published.

The editors of the European Journal of Higher Education found that authors described transparent peer review as ‘educational’ – a way to understand how editorial decisions are made – while reviewers welcomed the visibility it gave to their contributions (Taylor & Francis, 2024). [2]

But transparency isn’t only about reputation. It’s about showing the labour of editorial work. Review coordination, revisions, decisions – these are human judgements. Publishing them acknowledges that editorial evaluation is part of the scholarly record, not a shadow process that ends the moment the paper appears online.

What Changes Inside the Editorial Office

Implementing transparent review changes almost everything about how an office operates.

Editors must write decision letters that can withstand public reading. Off-hand phrasing or shorthand summaries no longer feel safe when those letters may appear alongside the article. Reviewer selection becomes more deliberate: who writes constructively, who can articulate critique with professionalism, who won’t require line-by-line redaction.

There are technical shifts, too. Submission systems must store and publish review files, anonymise where required, and generate cross-links to final papers. Workflows that once ended at ‘accept’ now extend to publication metadata, formatting, and redaction checks. Even training changes will occur, requiring new editors to learn to write decisions in a way that’s both transparent and legally careful.

And yet the greatest change is cultural. For the first time, editorial offices must view the review exchange not as private correspondence but as a future public document – one that represents the journal’s editorial integrity as much as the author’s scholarship.

The Advantages – Real and Perceived

Without question, the obvious benefit is accountability. When review records are public, readers can judge the robustness of the editorial process themselves. In an era of paper mills, fake reviews, and rising retractions, visible review acts as an assurance that says, this paper was genuinely evaluated.

The rationale mirrors the argument made in Nature’s 2025 editorial announcing its new policy – that publishing the review record ‘increases readers’ trust in published research and shows the rigour of the process’.[1]

There’s an educational upside, too. Transparent review turns journals into training grounds. The educational benefit has been demonstrated in recent studies: students who read published peer review exchanges gained a clearer understanding of critique and revision practices (Ababneh et al., 2024, Studies in Higher Education) [4].

Early-career researchers can see how criticism works in practice – what counts as a major revision, how authors frame their responses, how tone differs between a polite correction and a full rejection. For editors, it can also raise the quality of incoming reviews. Knowing that their words may later be read encourages reviewers to be both measured and specific.

Transparency can strengthen relationships as well. When authors and reviewers know that their exchange may become public, the tone often improves. Aggressive or dismissive reports tend to soften into professional critique. The review becomes less about authority and more about argument – which is, arguably, what peer review was always meant to be.

The Limits of Openness

Despite all of the above, it’s naïve to treat transparency as a cure-all. The same visibility that strengthens trust can also strip away the nuances.

Surveys of reviewers echo this anxiety: junior researchers in particular worry that a strongly negative review, even anonymised, could be traced back to them or harm future collaborations (Henriquez et al., 2023).[5] Controlled trials of open review have found that when reviewers’ comments are made public or signed, their reports tend to be longer but more restrained in tone, with fewer firm rejections (Van Rooyen et al., BMJ, 2010).[6]

There’s also the problem of selective transparency. Most journals publish reviews only for accepted papers, which means we still see only the polished half of the system. The sharp, negative reviews that stop weak work at the gate remain invisible. Readers might then assume that every paper undergoes collegial fine-tuning rather than hard scrutiny.

And while transparency can make a good process look better, it can also make a bad process harder to defend. A shallow review, a perfunctory decision letter, an editorial oversight – once public, these reveal not just the authors’ mistakes but the journal’s. That prospect makes some publishers nervous, and rightly so.

The Workload Question

We know that editors already struggle with reviewer fatigue. Adding another layer of process – redaction, metadata checks, permission tracking – can feel like one burden too many. Transparent review also requires new technical infrastructure and consistent policy enforcement: what gets published, when, and under what licence.

Some offices handle this through automation, and others handle it through manual curation. Neither is perfect. Automation can mis-anonymise, while manual work consumes staff time. For smaller journals without dedicated editorial support, transparency can be a logistical challenge, not a philosophical one.

That’s why the most successful adopters treat it as an evolution, not a revolution. They start small: pilot transparency for a subset of articles, survey participants, refine policies, and scale only when the workflow stabilises. Transparency imposed from above rarely survives first contact with production deadlines.

What Openness Actually Achieves

The promise of transparent peer review isn’t that it will fix the structural flaws of peer review. It won’t stop bias, speed up turnaround times, or create more reviewers. What it can do is make the system visible and therefore open to honest discussion.

When readers can see the path that a paper travelled – the objections raised, the revisions made – peer review becomes a process we can interrogate, not just merely trust. Such visibility changes the narrative from ‘Was this paper peer reviewed?’ to ‘How was this paper peer reviewed?’ It moves the conversation from binary legitimacy to qualitative evaluation.

Transparency also reframes responsibility. Once reports are public, editors can no longer hide behind anonymity either. The consistency of their decisions, the clarity of their letters, and the fairness of their tone are all part of the journal’s reputation. The shift from confidentiality to visibility creates a feedback loop that, over time, may do more to improve review quality than any policy mandate.

The Wider Question of Accountability

Transparent peer review sits within a broader movement towards openness – open data, open methods, open access. Yet, openness without accountability risks becoming decorative and more of a badge rather than a functional reform.

True accountability in peer review means acknowledging its human limits: the subjectivity of judgement, the uneven expertise across reviewers, the editorial triage that shapes what even reaches review. Transparency helps expose these imperfections, but it doesn’t resolve them. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s traceability – allowing the community to see the reasoning behind decisions and to trust that the process, however flawed, is real.

As editors, we know that every review exchange is a negotiation between rigour and pragmatism. Transparent review doesn’t change that; it simply makes it visible. And in visibility lies both discomfort and progress.

The 2025 Peer Review Week theme – ‘Rethinking Peer Review in the AI Era’ – underscored just how quickly technology is reshaping these questions of trust and transparency. AI tools are now being used to draft review text, flag potential conflicts, and even detect paper-mill patterns. Automation brings efficiency, but it also introduces a new level of opacity: who, exactly, is evaluating the work: a person, an algorithm, or a blend of both? Transparent peer review may become even more critical as AI enters the editorial workflow. When readers can see the full exchange between human reviewers and editors, it helps prove that judgement, not automation, still anchors the process.

Final Thought…

At PA EDitorial, we see transparency in peer review not as an end in itself but as part of a larger recalibration of trust. Editors want to be trusted for fairness; authors want to trust that fairness exists; readers want to trust the outcome. Publishing the review record is one way to prove that the trust is earned, not assumed.

But we also know that openness alone doesn’t make peer review better – people do. It is the care taken in choosing reviewers, the clarity of an editor’s letter, the professionalism of tone, and the willingness to own mistakes that build credibility. Transparent peer review simply lets those qualities show.

When the curtains open, we don’t find a perfect stage. We find people at work – tired, thoughtful, sometimes inconsistent, mostly sincere – doing their best to keep the system honest. And perhaps that, more than anything, is what transparency should reveal.