Confidentiality and the purpose of peer review

Great resource, thank you for putting it together!

Confidentiality

An issue re the section "How to peer review"/"Before you start"/"5. Keep it confidential" reads "Do not disclose any details about your review and the manuscript. In case you want someone to help you with your review, make sure to ask the editor beforehand."

People tend to internalise rules like this even when they're dysfunctional, so I think this requires more nuance. If we tell people early in their careers "reviews are private" a surprising portion of people feel they're not able to publicly critique work later that they reviewed, rather than a) the purpose of review is critique and b) they are very well placed to critique it.

First, open peer review is becoming more common. Readers might be surprised by the advice that they should not disclose their review if the journal then posts it publicly.

Second, the norm of review confidentiality exists in order to a) not have authors' ideas leaked or stolen, and b) to not publicly critique a private manuscript, or not critique a public manuscript based on previous private versions where the critique no longer applies. As such, if the authors have a preprint at the time of review, then your review does not need to be confidential and you're free to share it, and indeed others may benefit from it just like they would an open peer review post publication.

Or, all elements of your review that still apply to a later public version of the manuscript do not need to be private. This is just post publication peer review; the fact that you reviewed it prior to publication does not gag you from commenting later. I have encountered multiple people under this mistaken belief, which seems to come from missing the wood for the trees on the point of review and the point of confidentiality within review.

The purpose of peer review

This leads to a second broader suggestion, which was closely enough linked that I didn't open a separate issue. The guide currently does not have a section that clearly states the purpose of peer review, which (IMO) should include an acknowledgement that there is no singularly agreed point to peer review. It's function is to aid editors in making acceptance/rejection decisions, but its purpose has been stated variously as being a quality assurance mechanism or a mechanism for selecting important work or others. Equally importantly, the evidence suggests it does not accomplish either of these stated goals effectively. I am not at all against peer review, but I do think it's important to acknowledge this context to readers. Malte Elson and I teach a session in one of our masters seminars at UniBe on peer review, its history, goals, and efficacy; perhaps there is material from this that could be integrated in the guide.