The idea behind Open Peer Review is to bring transparency and accountability to the traditionally closed models of peer review. Open Peer Review can come in many different forms but the basic elements are:
- Transparency in the identity of reviewers and/or authors
- Publication of the content of the peer reviews (sometimes combined or edited)
- Opening up peer review to a wider community of interested readers
- Allowing interactions between authors, editors and reviewers to make peer review more collaborative and constructive
- Open peer review prior to publication by the use of preprints
- Enabling post-publication commenting so that readers can make comments and authors/other readers can respond
- Some platforms enable publication prior to peer review
