Double‐blind peer review—An experiment

2018 was a good year for Functional Ecology. Submissions to the journal remain high, having topped 1,200 at the time we write this editorial (early December 2018), on pace for just shy of 1,300 for the year, similar to the number received in 2017. The journal remains as selective as ever, accepting just over 16% of submissions. Our impact factor remains high, currently 5.49, and our ranking among all ecology journals is high, 9th based on Google Scholar's h5 index. Especially positive this past year is that the time from acceptance of a paper to its publication in an issue improved quite a bit, thanks to an opportunity we had to publish extra pages and reduce our backlog of in press papers. Our editorial team also remains one of the most diverse among the top ecology journals, with five Senior Editors drawn from three continents, and 98 Associate Editors (45% women) drawn from 22 countries and every continent (except Antarctica). At the risk of too much “tooting our own horn,” we thank this outstanding team for helping us continue to publish some of the most innovative and thought-provoking research in the field. Overall, the journal is in a good place, and we are very positive about our future. We anticipate that we will continue to publish similarly outstanding ecological research papers over the coming year. We also plan to publish at least four new special features, and a variety of commissioned review papers, in 2019. But we are especially excited to announce two new initiatives. One of these is the launch of a named annual review paper series, the Calow-Grace Reviews. The other is the start of a journal-wide experiment evaluating alternative models of peer review. There is a widespread perception among researchers that systemic biases influence the outcomes of peer review. In particular, there is concern that the gender, nationality, location or reputation of authors may influence how manuscripts are assessed by reviewers due to unconscious, or sometimes conscious, biases (Lee, Sugimoto, Zhang, & Cronin, 2013). For example, papers with highly regarded authors, or authors from prestigious institutions, can obtain higher scores during peer review (Blank, 1991; Tomkins, Zhang, & Heavlin, 2017). Editors and reviewers may also favour authors from the same country or that speak the same language as themselves (Murray et al., 2018). However, the source of potential bias that has received the most attention is author gender, for which studies are highly inconsistent in their outcomes. Some studies have found that papers by female authors obtain lower peer review scores, or have lower acceptance rates, at academic journals (Walker, Barros, Conejo, Neumann, & Telefont, 2015; Murray et al., 2018; and references therein), but others have failed to find a gender difference in peer review outcomes, or have even found that papers authored by women perform better than those authored by men (Lerback & Hanson, 2017). This inconsistency among studies, and the inability of most studies to distinguish among possible causes for differences they do observe, leave us uncertain about the influence of gender (and other author characteristics) on peer review. To reduce the influence of potential biases on peer review, a handful of journals in ecology have adopted new models of peer review, either requiring that author identities be masked from reviewers or allowing authors to choose whether their identity is disclosed to reviewers. However, the effectiveness of double-blind peer review in eliminating reviewer biases is uncertain, partly because few of the randomized trials that have been performed test for effects of author characteristics, and those studies that do generally have small sample sizes, lack appropriate controls, or are inconsistent in their conclusions. Nonetheless, many researchers believe that blinding of author identities will be effective at reducing or eliminating biases, and thus prefer double-blind peer review over the traditional single-blind model (Mulligan, Hall, & Raphael, 2013). We do not know whether the outcomes of peer review of papers to Functional Ecology are subject to the unconscious biases of the journal's reviewers. Whether such biases are present or not, the perception that such biases exist undermines confidence in the objectivity and fairness of peer review. Thus, beginning later this year, Functional Ecology will begin an experiment to test whether papers submitted to the journal experience discrimination based on characteristics of the authors —age, gender and location, among others— and to evaluate the broader consequences for the journal (and our authors) of adopting a double-blind model. Specifically, we will perform an experiment in which papers submitted to the journal are randomly assigned to one of two treatments, one treatment in which the authors’ identities are blinded to reviewers (double-blind peer review), and the other in which author's will be identified to reviewers (our current model). We do not have space in this editorial to summarize all of the details of the experiment, so will just highlight our objectives and a few key points below. A primary objective of this double-blind experiment will be to test whether papers reviewed by Functional Ecology are subject to biases dependent on characteristics of the authors, such as age, gender, geographic location, native language, reputation and home institution. However, we will also examine a variety of other questions regarding the role of anonymity in peer review, including whether anonymizing authors influences our ability to recruit reviewers, the quality of reviews received (such as the tone and length of the submitted review), or the average rating given to papers, irrespective of author characteristics. We will also survey authors (after the final decisions are rendered on papers) to assess their opinions of various aspects of the peer review process, including the specifics of how their paper was reviewed, and survey reviewers to assess both their opinions of double-blind peer review and their ability to identify the authors of the paper they reviewed (i.e., to assess the effectiveness of the blinding process). Finally, we will quantify the additional editorial office time required to run a double-blind peer review process. This is an ambitious project intended to provide the data necessary for this journal, and hopefully for other ecological journals, to assess the costs and benefits of double-blind peer review. If you are an author considering submitting your paper to Functional Ecology, you are likely wondering how this experiment will affect your submission to the journal. In short, we plan for this to have very little effect on the submission process. The primary change, from the author perspective, will be that all parts of your manuscript that contain author identifiers—particularly the title page and acknowledgements—will need to be uploaded as separate documents. Whether these parts of your manuscript will be provided to reviewers will depend on the treatment to which the manuscript is assigned, and will be handled “behind the scenes” in our manuscript tracking system. Authors will also be asked to provide some demographic data about themselves upon submission of their paper. We recognize that some authors may be hesitant to submit demographic information to the journal, but we emphasize that these data will not be available to editors handling manuscripts and will only be available to the researchers under the guidance of university “research with human subjects” guidelines and in compliance with US and UK law. Authors may also wonder whether they can choose how their manuscript will be reviewed, with their identity blinded or not, or whether they can opt out of the experiment. The short answer is “no”; whether author identities are blinded during peer review will be determined randomly and not by the authors or even by the editorial office. Peer review will be handled identically for all papers with the exception of whether author-identifying information is present in review invitation letters and on title pages and acknowledgement sections (as they currently are). Authors will be notified, at the time of submission of their manuscript, that their manuscript will be part of the experiment, and will need to agree to participate in the randomized trial before their manuscript can be reviewed. However, they will not be provided information on how their manuscript has been reviewed—single versus double blind—until after the final decision has been rendered. Further details of our peer review experiment will be shared on the Functional Ecology blog (functionalecologists.com) as we get closer to our start date. For further background on the costs and benefits of double-blind peer review, please see the blog post by Bob O'Hara on the Methods in Ecology and Evolution blog (https://methodsblog.com/2016/09/22/peer-review-week-should-we-use-double-blind-peer-review-the-evidence/). We welcome feedback on this project. Please send your comments or queries to Emilie Aimé, our Managing Editor (emilie@britishecologicalsociety.org). We are also pleased to announce that, in 2019, Functional Ecology will recruit the first paper for our new annual Calow-Grace review series. For this series, we will invite researchers who have made significant contributions to ecology (as did Peter Calow and John Grace), and ask them to share their perspective on one of the many topics (of their choice) that lie within Functional Ecology's broad scope. Authors for our Calow-Grace series will be chosen from among our most innovative thinkers, and for their experience and depth of knowledge of the field. Authors will be asked to place ideas in a historical context, but will be especially encouraged to be speculative and forward thinking, offering novel insights that will push ecological research forward into important new areas. The first paper in the new series will be invited shortly, so look for it to be published in early 2020. We opted to name our annual series the Calow-Grace reviews to honour the journal's two founding editors, Peter Calow and John Grace, both of whom are important figures in ecology, and without whom the journal would not be what it is today. Naming this review after Peter and John is an important nod to our journal's proud history, but we also pride ourselves on being a forward-looking journal. In particular, we recognize the importance of diversity to the field of ecology, and thus will ensure that authors of the Calow-Grace reviews reflect the diversity of experiences that is a strength of our field. We are pleased to kick off 2019 with the current issue, in which we include the first of several special features we will be publishing this year. Special features in Functional Ecology are sets of conceptual-focused and synthetic papers, including a mix of reviews and perspectives, that collectively review the current state of the literature, highlight recent advances, develop new concepts, and provide insights for important avenues of future research. In this issue, we include the special feature “Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics Across Scales,” guest edited by Franziska Brunner, Jacques Deere, Martijn Egas, Christophe Eizaguirre and Joost Raeymaekers (Brunner et al., 2019). The recognition that the rate of evolution can be exceptionally fast in response to ecological change has required ecologists to re-evaluate the historical concepts of “ecological time” and “evolutionary time” that were so commonly treated as distinct timescales in ecology textbooks just a generation ago. We now know that evolutionary responses to ecological change can occur very fast, and can have effects on ecological interactions, such that understanding the interaction between ecological and evolutionary dynamics has become essential to understanding patterns of biodiversity (Pelletier, Garant, & Hendry, 2009) and both community and ecosystem processes (Fussmann, Loreau, & Abrams, 2007). In this special feature, Franziska Brunner and her colleagues collect together a set of reviews, perspectives and empirical papers investigating the context-dependent nature of feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes, aptly named “eco-evolutionary feedbacks,” with an emphasis on the role of scale in understanding these feedbacks. Unlike most of our special features, this was a cross-journal project, including 10 contributions (plus an editorial) spread between two journals, the Journal of Animal Ecology and, of course, Functional Ecology. Later this year look for us to publish more special features, including one on “coral reef functioning in the Anthropocene,” another on “sensory ecology and social decisions” and one on “senescence at the crossroads of ecology, physiology, health and evolution” (exact titles are likely to evolve between now and publication). Other special features, including one on evolution of microbiomes, are “in the pipeline” and may also make it to print before the end of the year. The editors of Functional Ecology are always eager to discuss new special feature topics. If you are coordinating a symposium on an emerging or particularly timely topic in ecology, or if have a topic you believe deserving of a special feature, feel free to reach out to any of the members of our editorial team, or contact us at the journal's primary email address (admin@functionalecology.org), and we will be happy to discuss your ideas. We have also published an excellent selection of stand-alone review articles this year, thanks to our authors and to our outstanding Reviews Editor, Emma Sayer, who works tirelessly to recruit and edit these reviews. Emma has written an editorial (Sayer, 2018) which gives useful advice to authors on how to write a synthetic review article.