Electronic communication among reviewers and publishers or granting agencies threatens peer reviewers’ anonymity, according to an entry on Nature’s Peer-to-Peer blog this week. Cristofre Martin of St George’s University in Grenada, West Indies, and Kenneth Storey of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, note that most state-of-the-art software applications embed information about the creator of the document with the normally invisible metadata of the file. But these metadata can easily be viewed, providing the user with the account information associated with the specific computer used to generate the document. Authors, journal editors, publishers and granting agencies need to be cautious about how ‘anonymous’ information is transmitted between the creator and the recipient.
Nature Publishing Group journals use a web-based peer-review system to ensure anonymity, as do many other publishers. Further details of NPG policies can be found at the authors and reviewers’ website.
Nature 447, xi;31 May 2007