Can the OJS interface be used to set up triple-blind review?

Hello,

I am part of a team working for the academic journal Hume Studies, which is

currently using an Open Journal Systems web interface. We are interested in

exploring possibilities for triple blind review, and I was wondering if editorial

process could accommodate that interest.

As the journal is currently set up, submissions are directed automatically to the

assigned section editors, rather than being directed first to the ‘editor’, who

would then send them along to section editors. This way, the section editor sees

the information about the authors of the submissions to which we want the section

editors to be blind.

I am wondering if the section editors could be blinded to the author information

if the submissions went first to the editor and then, from her, to the section

editors rather than going to the section editors directly. Would there be some

way, in other words, for the editor to remove the author information before she

sends the submission along to the relevant section editor?

I have a number of other questions which I could more effectively ask over a

telephone call. If there is a phone number available, I’d be grateful if you would

provide it in your reply to this query.

Many thanks,

Luke McNulty

1 Like

Hi @Luke,

At the moment, OJS doesn’t support blinding of section editors. In order to support it, it would be necessary to make a large number of small changes – basically to review where author and reviewer information is presented, and optionally obscure it from the section editor. This hasn’t been a common requirement amongst our user community, so it hasn’t been a priority yet.

We do have occasional VOIP meetings – but the support forum here has the advantage of building a knowledge base around questions and answers. If you like, feel free to post your questions as separate topics, and we’ll do our best to respond quickly.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Thanks very much, Alec.

Hi
We are also interested in an implementation of triple-blind review. Do you have any plans to implement triple-blind in future releases?

/ @eddoff

Hi all,

With apologies for the delay, no, we don’t currently have plans to implement triple-anonymous review, but it is a good feature request and we do consider community interest. (And community contributions of code are always welcome.) I’d suggest filing a new feature request in Github (note our intention to change review terminology to make the language more inclusive) with some concrete detail on how you’d like to see this implemented within OJS.

Thanks,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team