| How about if the anonymity is "de-blinded" only partially, replacing it with pseudonymity? Imagine a system like this: 1. The reviewers on your paper not only have to collaborate on a decision to accept/reject, but also write an opinion (like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_opinion) about your paper, individual to themselves, after the consensus to accept/reject is reached (so some of them will likely be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissenting_opinion s.) 2. The reviewers are each assigned a global permanent pseudonymous identifier—a UUID, basically—known only to them and some "Society for the Advancement of the Scientific Process in Academia" organization. 3. Every vote a peer-reviewer makes, and also every opinion they write about a paper, must be registered with the same academic-process org, whose job is then to collate and publish them to the Internet under the reviewer's pseudonymous identifier. You'd be able to use such a website to both 1. audit the peer-review process for a given paper; and 2. cross-reference a given peer-reviewer's votes/opinions. Additionally, the standards body itself could use the cross-referencing ability to normalize peer-reviewer votes, ala how the Netflix Prize recommendation systems normalized votes by a person's interpretation of the star ratings. (They'd have to ask peer-reviewers to vote with something more fine-grained than a binary pass/fail, but that'd be an easy change.) The only thing I would worry about in such a system, is that academics might not want the negative opinions of the peer-reviewers on their paper to pop up when random other people plug the paper's DOI into Google Scholar, because a dissent on an accepted paper might unduly impact the paper's impact-factor. |