What role does anonymity play in scientific publication?

Discussions around anonymity in scientific publications have been gaining traction in the scholarly circles in recent days. While the advocates of open science stress on transparency and accessibility, there is a growing sentiment among some scientific folk about the need for nondisclosure of certain details in publishing to counter the “status over merit” culture of academia.

Sparking fresh debates about the topic, Michael Eisen – a biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley – announced last month that he has stripped all of his publications of their journal names. He stated that, “We [also] do not believe that journal titles convey useful information about the quality or value of published works and therefore provide here only a list of authors and the title of each work along with links to the paper.” The fact is that the impact factor of the journal that a researcher publishes in continues to be considered gold standard when assessing how successful a researcher is. Inevitably, this seamier side of academia has been one of the root causes of scientific misconduct.

While most agree that researchers should be evaluated by merit rather than the publication venues, Eisen’s move has received a mixed response. Claus Wilke, a scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “Hiding journal names from the publication list is directly at odds with the principles of openness and egalitarianism that people like Michael Eisen so strongly promote.” He adds that till the time a researcher is a part of the conventional publishing system, he/she should maintain openness about the publishing venue. A better way of demonstrating that journals are not as important as the research itself, according to Wilke, is to drop the race to publish in high-ranking journals or publish papers only on preprint servers.

While Eisen has proposed hiding the journal names in an attempt to draw attention away from the prestige aspect and direct it towards the actual research instead, Paul Hanel, a psychologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, goes a step further by suggesting that papers should be stripped of all identifiers or metadata. In a paper titled “Why scientific publications should be anonymous,” Hanel suggests that to truly avoid all biases, “Every publication should be published without any reference to the author(s), their position, the institution(s), the address of the researcher(s), and the journal.” Explaining this extreme stance, he lists various merits of removing all identifiers but the titles from papers. A few noteworthy arguments he makes are:

• Papers would be freed of biases when it comes to peer review and citations. Female authors would not face discrimination, which will essentially tackle the issue of gender bias in academia.
• Not adding names of authors to papers would end the malpractice of guest authorship wherein authors have to add their seniors as coauthors or even refer to the papers written by editors in order to get published.

Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, the cofounders of Retraction Watch, are critical of Hanel’s suggestion and think that it is equivalent to “destroying the academic village in order to rid it of pests.” If papers were to be recognized only by their titles, it would become difficult to track any conflicts of interest or detect cases of misconduct. Moreover, a manuscript’s accessibility and retrievability, which depends largely on its metadata, such as the journal name, the author names, and other publication details, would get affected. However, the pair concedes that Hanel has aptly pointed to the fact that “Science is not a pure meritocracy, or even close to one.”

Anonymity, in general terms, plays a vital role in science. Without this cloak of invisibility, researchers may not feel comfortable to act as whistleblowers or comment freely on published papers. Young researchers, in particular, may be reluctant to be openly critical of senior researchers. However, there are proponents of open science who would like even post-publication peer reviewing to be non-anonymous. But when it comes to publication, this can get tricky. I second Eisen’s thought that it hardly matters where a paper is published as opposed to what the paper contains. However, the existence of predatory journals makes it difficult to dismiss the whole concept of publication venue as being irrelevant. Authors with fraudulent data may find an easy way to publication and the scientific and, more so, the non-scientific community would not know whether the journal that published the paper upholds industry standards of quality and publishes ethically.

The idea of hiding author and/or journal details from published work is sure to evoke strong reactions from the scientific community as there are as many merits as demerits of resorting to anonymity. What are your suggestions and views on this issue? Please share your thoughts.        

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