We are delighted to announce that Environmental Science: Nano, Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts and Environmental Science: Water Research &Technology will be offering authors a choice of single- or double-blind peer review for submitted manuscripts.
In traditional single-blind peer review the reviewers are anonymous, but author names and affiliations are known to reviewers.
In double-blind peer review the authors and reviewers’ identities are concealed from each other.
The option for double-blind peer review will be available to authors from 9th September for Environmental Science: Nano, and from 7th October for Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts and Environmental Science: Water Research &Technology.
The choice of which peer review model should be used for each manuscript will be completely up to the authors. However, as an author, if you opt for the double-blind process you will need to anonymise your manuscript before submission, avoiding mention of any information that might give your identity away. Authors who choose this option will be responsible for ensuring their submission is anonymised; we have prepared a checklist to help you.
As a reviewer for our Environmental Science journals, you may be invited to review a manuscript that has been anonymised. All communication with you regarding double-blind manuscripts will omit author and affiliation details.
Why double-blind?
To date, our Environmental Science journals have used the traditional, single-blind peer review model favoured by most scientific journals, and we continue to trust in the effectiveness of this system. However, we recognise that there has been growing interest in double-blind peer review from our community. Advocates of double-blind review suggest that it can reduce the impact of biases, both obvious and subtle, conscious or unconscious, on peer review. These biases could be based on gender, ethnicity, author affiliation, and so on.
