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 ruling out a whole body of useful work that may be barred by fearful reviewers. While some may see such strictness as an advantage – a tightening of review standards – given the historical parallel to page budgets and evolutions in social and technological ﬁltering processes (see below), the argument that this is solely about quality may be less solid than might be thought. Finally, although the revelation of reviewer identity in some ways helps spot corruption (as any afﬁliation to the author would be obvious), the extreme burden to ‘make the right call’ could encourage reviewers to seek the author’s identity. This tactic exposes reviewers and makes a thankless task perhaps even more risky.

What, then, about completely removing all anonymity from the process? There are some advantages in this case (as outlined above) but there still remains no counter-balance to the problems that could arise as a result of exposing reviewers. Conversely, reviewers would surely also be prone to appraise the author’s identity in this case.

Evidently, in each of the cases where anonymity is removed, during the review process itself, there are problems that seem, to some degree, worse than the ﬂaws in a double-blind setup. However, this solely applies when discussing a gatekeeper model in which a paper only sees the light of day so that the journal may be associated with the most exclusive papers in order to protect its brand. Other, more radical, experiments in the sciences have worked to change this. For instance, the review criteria of PLOS ONE – now an enormous journal that has published over 100,000 articles since its launch in 20068 – reads as follows:

Too often a journal’s decision to publish a paper is dominated by what the Editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership – both of which are subjective judgments and lead to decisions which are frustrating and delay the publication of your work. PLOS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership (who are the most qualiﬁed to determine what is of interest to them). 9

This model implements a ﬁx for what Clay Shirky has called ‘ﬁlter failure’. In an inﬂuential 2008 keynote at the New York ‘Web 2.0’ expo, Shirky identiﬁed a new form of post-Gutenberg economics in which he proposed the overturn of the ﬁlter-ﬁrst model