Open Reviews is a good first step. Pseudo-Anonymous Reviews can take it further.

Nature journal recently announced that all their reviews will be henceforth open. This is a good first step that will hopefully extend to other journals in Springer Nature as well as other major publishers. It will go a long way in improving trust in Science. They will also allow reviewers to choose to be anonymous. Blind peer review is one of the pillars of the publication system and the choice of reviewers needs to be respected.

However, there have been a lot of reported cases where reviewers abuse this anonymity to ask for citations to their own articles, sometimes not even related to the paper being reviewed. Increasingly, a lot of reviews are also done by AI, leading to low quality feedback.

To mitigate these issues, one can make the reviews Psuedo-Anonymous, i.e. the reviews should be traceable. Research integrity teams can then verify the bad ‘actors’. It will also act as a deterrent for people providing shoddy, lazy or unfair reviews.

Additionally, it will help provide useful analytics for both editors as well as readers and help them take more informed decisions.