To blind or not to blind

Abstract

During this COVID-19 pandemic, I was invited to review several papers from well-reputed and high-impact factor journals. Surprisingly, the review of these papers was not blind, allowing me to know the authors and their institutions. Not blinding the reviews allows reviewers to decide whether accept or not the task and can predispose the reviewer's final decision. What was more striking for me was to know that some authors do not accept blind reviews. In our journal, all papers are blindly reviewed by two well-reputed reviewers with expertise in the topic. BLINDLY. Even our copyeditor, who checks and corrects English language mistakes, is blind to the paper's authorship. Although the time for publishing is sometimes long, the edition process is systematic and thoughtful, even changing or adding some reviewers when necessary. All the process but creating the PDF files is voluntary and free, done by different WFOT members. In issue 6, we have collected different topic papers; the paper from Recio deserves special mention, as it has belonged to grey literature since 2007. I read this paper in 2008, but I have not been able to contact ANY of the authors till recently Dr. Javier Cespedes found Dr. Marizta Palma that authorized its publication in our journal. Issue 7 will be the Proceedings of the 7th Meeting of the WFOT that will take place in Bucharest in 2022. We are now collecting papers for issue 8.