Auditability and Ethics in Peer Review: A Platform-Based Approach

This paper examines the concepts of auditability and ethics in peer review within contemporary scholarly publishing and proposes a platform-based approach to address long-standing challenges related to transparency, accountability, and research integrity. Peer review plays a critical role in validating academic knowledge, yet traditional workflows often rely on opaque, email-driven processes that lack verifiable audit trails and enforceable ethical safeguards. Issues such as undisclosed conflicts of interest, reviewer bias, editorial discretion, and limited accountability have intensified calls for more transparent and trustworthy systems. Using a conceptual and comparative methodology, this study synthesizes existing literature on peer review ethics and analyzes how digital peer review platforms can embed auditability directly into editorial workflows. The paper discusses mechanisms such as event logging, role-based access control, decision traceability, and ethical compliance checks, and evaluates their effectiveness in mitigating ethical risks. The findings suggest that platform-centric peer review architectures significantly enhance transparency and ethical governance when compared to traditional models, while also introducing new considerations related to privacy, governance, and standardization. The paper contributes to ongoing discussions on research integrity, open science, and the modernization of scholarly communication infrastructure. This work is intended for students, researchers, editors, publishers, and platform developers interested in ethical peer review systems, academic governance, and digital publishing innovation. The manuscript is shared as an open-access preprint and may be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in the future.