Methodology - Review of definitions of Open Peer Review in the scholarly literature 2016 

To resolve ambiguities surrounding the term open peer review, in August 2016 OpenAIRE (openaire.eu) performed 
a review of the literature for articles discussing open review or open peer review, extracting a corpus of 
122 definitions of OPR. We first searched Web of Science for TOPIC: ("open review" OR "open peer review"), 
with no limitation on date of publication, yielding a total of 137 results (searched on 12-7-2016). These records 
were then each individually examined for relevance and a total of 57 were excluded: 21 results (all BioMed Central 
publications) had been through an OPR process (which was mentioned in the abstract) but did not themselves touch 
on the subject of OPR; 12 results used the phrase open review to refer to a literature review with a flexible 
methodology, rather than in any connection with peer review; 12 results were for the review of objects classed as 
out of scope (i.e., review of things other than scientific research objects  academic articles, books, 
conference submissions, data  i.e., guidelines for clinical or therapeutic techniques, standardized terminologies, 
patent applications, and court judgements); 7 results were not in the English language; and 5 results were duplicate 
entries in WoS. This left a total of 80 relevant articles which mentioned either open peer review or open review. 
This set was then enriched with a further 42 definitions from sources found through searching for the same terms via 
other academic databases (e.g., Google Scholar, JSTOR, disciplinary databases), searching Google (for Blog articles) 
and Google Books (books), as well as following citations in relevant bibliographies and literature review articles. 

Each source was then individually examined for its definition of OPR. Where no explicit definition (e.g., OPR is ) 
was given, implicit definitions were gathered from contextual statements (e.g., reviewers can notify the editors if 
they want to opt-out of the open review system and stay anonymous (Janowicz and Hitzler, 2012) is taken to endorse a 
definition of OPR as incorporating open identities). In a few cases, sources defined OPR in relation to the systems 
of specific publishers (e.g., F1000Research, BioMed Central and Nature), and so were taken to implicitly endorse 
those systems as definitive of OPR. The extracted definitions were examined and classified against an iteratively 
constructed taxonomy of OPR traits:

- Open identities: Authors and reviewers are aware of each other's identity.
- Open reports: Review reports are published alongside the relevant article.
- Open participation: The wider community to able to contribute to the review process.
- Open pre-review manuscripts: Manuscripts are made immediately available (e.g., via pre-print servers like ArXiv) in advance of any formal peer review procedures.
- Open final-version commenting: Review or commenting on final version of record publications.
- Open interaction: Direct reciprocal discussion between author(s) and reviewers, and/or between reviewers, is allowed and encouraged.
- Open platforms: Review is de-coupled from publishing in that it is facilitated by a different organizational entity than the venue of publication.
