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The Wildlife Society publications' commitment to reducing bias and increasing accountability in the peer‐review process

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Our last editorial in The Journal of Wildlife Management explored the evidence for and against double-anonymous (DA) review (where both the author and reviewers remain anonymous) as a means of reducing bias in the peer review process, considered potential pros and cons associated with fully open reviews (where both author and reviewer names are known), and outlined other published recommendations intended to help shore up the integrity of scientific peer review (Frair 2025).In terms of whether biases might be reduced by a DA model, the short answer is maybe.Benefits could be limited for publications of The Wildlife Society (TWS) because reviewers may often discern authorship based on species, geography, and other attributes of the study (Fox et al. 2023).There is no question that DA review would require more up-front effort on the part of authors and behind-the-scenes effort by publications staff to fully anonymize manuscripts; however, new tools provided by manuscript handling software may help minimize those costs.Yet the degree to which authors of articles in TWS journals would benefit from DA reviews remains an open question.Following that editorial, we asked our community of Associate Editors (AEs) and editorial staff to weigh in on best practices for reducing bias and increasing accountability in the peer review process. SURVEY OF THE TWS EDITORIAL COMMUNITYWe held an Associate Editor Community Forum (14 Mar 2025; 23 participants) to hear from Michael Willis, an expert on review models, about the evidence for and against DA reviews.Our AEs then suggested a range of actions TWS journals might take to overcome established biases in the peer review process, increase transparency and integrity, and help ensure that our publications remain a leading resource for wildlife conservation and management.Generally, we received engaged and insightful feedback, detected ambivalence towards wholesale changes in our peer review process, and made note of several recommendations for incremental changes that might achieve meaningful impact with relatively little time costs to our authors, reviewers, editors, and staff.To help gauge support for the various alternatives raised, including DA review, fully open review, and incremental actions, we conducted a poll of our AEs, Editors, and editorial staff (n = 34 responses; ~46% response rate).We report on those survey results here.When asked if TWS journals should move to DA review, the results were equivocal, with 38% of respondents remaining on the fence (neither agreeing nor disagreeing), 32% being in favor (somewhat or strongly agreeing), and 30% being against (somewhat or strongly disagreeing).We observed moderate support for a suggested incremental alternative-specifically for keeping author names and affiliations anonymous when sending invitations to potential reviewers (to potentially minimize positive association bias when choosing to review) but revealing author names after requests are accepted (to ensure no conflicts of interest)-with 62% in favor, 24% on the fence, and 15% against.In contrast, there was a clear desire not to move to a fully open review model (73% against, 9% in favor).With respect to other proposed incremental changes, we observed support for Editors redacting or editing clearly biased reviews (91% in favor) and requiring the Editorial Board to complete training on how to recognize and guard against implicit bias (70% in favor, 15% against).Support was also observed for continuing to diversify our board of AEs (80% in favor).The balance tipped towards encouraging (not requiring) reviewers to complete training Journal of Wildlife Management 2025;e70044.wileyonlinelibrary.
DOI: 10.1002/jwmg.70044
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4410758583
FWCI: 3.626
Cites: 4
Cited by: 1
Related to: 10