Open peer review has moved from radical experiment to mainstream option. Some form of transparency — published reviewer identity, published review content, post-publication peer review — is now offered by a majority of major journals as either default or opt-in. The CASRAI open peer review entry tracks the policy landscape; this post focuses on the integration layer that makes the practice work.
What open peer review actually is
The phrase covers several distinct practices that share a transparency commitment but differ in what is made transparent. Open identities: reviewer names are disclosed to authors or published with the paper. Open reports: review content is published alongside the paper. Open participation: peer review is conducted in public, with the broader community able to contribute. Open final-version commenting: post-publication commenting is supported as a continuation of review. Different journals combine these differently.
The current state in 2026: open reports are widely offered (eLife, EMBO Journal, PLOS, Nature Communications, BMJ, F1000Research, Royal Society Open Science, and many others), open identities are less common as default but offered as an opt-in by many, open participation remains the most experimental, and open final-version commenting is supported on most major platforms but lightly used.
The signal infrastructure
For open peer review to integrate with the research-information ecosystem, three signals need to be carried through the metadata.
First, the review-as-output signal. A peer review is itself a scholarly output. Crossref’s review-type DOIs, introduced in 2017 and now widely used, give each review a citable identifier. The review DOI is linked to the article DOI via the reviewed-relationship metadata. A reviewer can be credited for the review as a structured output, separately from any co-authorship.
Second, the reviewer-identifier signal. ORCID’s peer-review activity record carries reviews by ORCID iD. A reviewer whose name is disclosed and who has consented to ORCID-record deposit gets the review entered into their ORCID profile, with the journal as the source and the verification provided by the publisher’s deposit. The CASRAI ORCID implementation guide walks through the deposit patterns.
Third, the review-credit signal. The 2024 work on a structured taxonomy for peer-review contribution — distinguishing the actions of a reviewer (read, queried, recommended changes, validated computation, validated data) — has produced a working vocabulary that several journals now apply at review-submission time. The vocabulary is in the CASRAI research integrity domain.
The attribution layer
The attribution layer is where open peer review interlocks with broader research recognition. Pre-Publons-acquisition, the dominant pattern was that journal-published reviews counted as a recognised scholarly output but the cross-journal aggregation was patchy. Publons consolidated some of this; the post-acquisition (Clarivate-owned, now part of Web of Science) state is functional but not as integrated as the community would prefer.
The current best practice is: review with open identity disclosed; review content published under a CC BY licence with a review DOI; review deposited to ORCID via the publisher’s member API; review surfaced in the reviewer’s narrative CV with appropriate context. The result is a reviewer recognition trail that supports promotion, tenure, and career-development assessments.
For institutional research-administration offices, the implication is to capture peer-review contribution in CRIS systems and in researcher reporting. Several institutions have built peer-review dashboards from ORCID-deposit data; the practice is becoming standard at research-intensive universities.
The CRediT interlock
The CRediT taxonomy as currently constituted does not include a Peer Review role; peer review is treated as separate from authorship-related contributorship. There is a structural reason for this: peer review is a per-paper recognition that does not produce co-authorship; CRediT is the co-authorship contributorship taxonomy. Conflating them would muddy both.
The clean separation is: CRediT for paper contributorship (author roles); review DOIs and ORCID peer-review records for reviewer recognition (separately). The two structures are complementary; a researcher’s CV should surface both. The CASRAI peer-review credit guide walks through the integration.
The gaps still open
Three gaps deserve attention in 2026.
First, the cross-journal aggregation gap. Reviews live with the journals that solicited them; ORCID provides the per-reviewer view; but the cross-journal picture (what fraction of reviews in field X are openly published, what review-to-acceptance lag distribution exists, who is reviewing for whom) is harder to assemble. The OpenAIRE Graph has begun ingesting review-DOI data; the picture is improving but not complete.
Second, the quality-signal gap. Open review content is variable in quality; the integration ecosystem treats all reviews as equivalent. A short, perfunctory open review and a substantial methodological critique both get a review DOI and an ORCID entry. The community has not yet developed quality signals for review content; doing so without producing perverse incentives is genuinely difficult.
Third, the uneven adoption gap. The major open-publishing platforms have committed to transparency; many traditional journals offer open review as opt-in but with low uptake. A reviewer’s open-review track record is incomplete if many of their reviews are at journals that do not support open review. The trajectory is positive but uneven.
What CASRAI recommends
Four recommendations. First, journals should default to open reports with reviewer-identity opt-in; the default-opt-in distinction matters for uptake. Second, publishers should deposit reviews to Crossref and ORCID consistently, with the review-credit metadata. Third, institutions should capture peer-review contribution in their CRIS systems and surface it in researcher recognition. Fourth, the responsible-assessment community should treat substantial peer-review work as a legitimate and recognised contribution in narrative CVs and promotion dossiers.
For reviewers, the practical advice is to opt for open identity where journal policy allows, to take the time to write reviews that are substantive enough to count as contributions in their own right, and to maintain their ORCID peer-review record. For authors, the practical advice is to engage seriously with open reviews when received — the public-facing nature is a feature, not a threat.
The longer arc
Open peer review’s mainstreaming is happening alongside, and partly in tension with, the broader concerns about reviewer burden and the sustainability of peer review as an unpaid scholarly contribution. The integration improvements — review DOIs, ORCID deposit, structured credit signals — make peer review more visible, but visibility alone does not solve the volume problem. The responsible-assessment community’s recognition of peer review as legitimate contribution is necessary; it is not sufficient. The next phase of the conversation will likely centre on reviewer compensation, reviewer-load capping, and the integration of peer review into institutional workload models.
