Open Peer Review: A New Challenge for Cosmetics

Dear Readers, As part of a continued effort to improve the quality of our papers and the transparency of the publication process, Cosmetics will introduce in the near future the possibility for the Authors to choose an Open Peer Review process (OPR). OPR is as a process in which the names of the authors and reviewers may be known to each other, and where review reports are published alongside the final manuscript, with the aim to facilitate discussion and clarity between the authors and the reviewer(s). I think this could be a highly innovative approach for undergoing the reviewing process and improve the interactions between authors and reviewers, leading to a better quality of the final published manuscript. Indeed, the single-blinded system of peer reviewing widely used today can generate serious problems, where the reviewer may be biased against the authors of the paper, and lean toward rejection or acceptance for unscientific reasons. Another drawback of traditional peer review is that the referee reports are visible only to the authors and the editor and cannot be discussed (if needed) by the scientific community. There are several benefits for authors and readers, including the possibility to check who has reviewed the paper, to have additional information from the comments of the reviewers, and the chance to reduce bias among reviewers who will likely write more constructive reviews. For readers, students and young scientist the possibility to see the reviewers' comments and authors' responses could be a good learning platform to better design, perform, and write scientific studies and papers. OPR has been already used by several journal including among them BMJ and BioMed Central journals which were the first, a few years ago, to test this option. MDPI approached the OPR process with the journal Life [1] giving the choice both to authors and reviewers to disclose the comments or their signatures respectively in a tab on the article webpage. This will be an option and will occur only at the end of the reviewing process, keeping in mind that the final acceptance of the paper is the responsibility of the editor. I am sure that with the optional choice of OPR, Cosmetics will further improve its visibility and will attract more and more high quality papers, generating knowledge and open discussion through the international scientific community and the web.