Open Peer Review for Evaluating Academic Legal Publications: The “Antidote” to an “Ill” Blind Peer Review?

Abstract

Numerous peer-reviewed law journals, in particular Latin-American ones, stand out for their general use of blind methods to assess the substantive quality of academic articles. Nevertheless, this traditional peer review model is considered ill (i.e. poor-quality) across disciplines due to different technical and social issues. The cause seems to be the anonymity between the actors involved. Then, open peer review models have emerged as an antidote to combat the main symptoms that the blind model presents, namely, lack of transparency during the process and absence of reviewers’ accountability. However, thus far law journals have not adopted an open system yet. Moreover, neither theoretical nor empirical research has been conducted about its potential use. This article presents an in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of both the traditional and the open identities review models in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines – in which the latter has been broadly applied. This paper compares the experience of STEM disciplines in relation to both of the methods and use the insights from this comparison to examine the legal discipline. The author specifically argues that unmasking the identities of authors and evaluators may be a suitable way to counteract only some of the flaws that the blind model has entailed in the evaluation of academic legal publications, therefore a mixed method could be a fairer alternative for current blind-peer-reviewed law journals. The author concludes by providing recommendations for further research.