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  • The Unjournal
  • An Introduction to The Unjournal
    • Content overview
    • How to get involved
      • Brief version of call
      • Impactful Research Prize (pilot)
      • Jobs and paid projects with The Unjournal
        • Advisory/team roles (research, management)
        • Administration, operations and management roles
        • Research & operations-linked roles & projects
        • Standalone project: Impactful Research Scoping (temp. pause)
      • Independent evaluations (trial)
        • Reviewers from previous journal submissions
    • Organizational roles and responsibilities
      • Unjournal Field Specialists: Incentives and norms (trial)
    • Our team
      • Reinstein's story in brief
    • Plan of action
    • Explanations & outreach
      • Press releases
      • Outreach texts
      • Related articles and work
    • Updates (earlier)
      • Impactful Research Prize Winners
      • Previous updates
  • Why Unjournal?
    • Reshaping academic evaluation: Beyond accept/reject
    • Promoting open and robust science
    • Global priorities: Theory of Change (Logic Model)
      • Balancing information accessibility and hazard concerns
    • Promoting 'Dynamic Documents' and 'Living Research Projects'
      • Benefits of Dynamic Documents
      • Benefits of Living Research Projects
    • The File Drawer Effect (Article)
    • Open, reliable, and useful evaluation
      • Multiple dimensions of feedback
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
    • For research authors
    • Evaluation ('refereeing')
    • Suggesting and prioritizing research
  • Our policies: evaluation & workflow
    • Project submission, selection and prioritization
      • What research to target?
      • What specific areas do we cover?
      • Process: prioritizing research
        • Prioritization ratings: discussion
      • Suggesting research (forms, guidance)
      • "Direct evaluation" track
      • "Applied and Policy" Track
      • 'Conditional embargos' & exceptions
      • Formats, research stage, publication status
    • Evaluation
      • For prospective evaluators
      • Guidelines for evaluators
        • Why these guidelines/metrics?
        • Proposed curating robustness replication
        • Conventional guidelines for referee reports
      • Why pay evaluators (reviewers)?
      • Protecting anonymity
    • Mapping evaluation workflow
      • Evaluation workflow – Simplified
    • Communicating results
    • Recap: submissions
  • What is global-priorities-relevant research?
  • "Pivotal questions"
    • ‘Operationalizable’ questions
    • Why "operationalizable questions"?
  • Action and progress
    • Pilot steps
      • Pilot: Building a founding committee
      • Pilot: Identifying key research
      • Pilot: Setting up platforms
      • Setting up evaluation guidelines for pilot papers
      • 'Evaluators': Identifying and engaging
    • Plan of action (cross-link)
  • Grants and proposals
    • Survival and Flourishing Fund (successful)
    • ACX/LTFF grant proposal (as submitted, successful)
      • Notes: post-grant plan and revisions
      • (Linked proposals and comments - moved for now)
    • Unsuccessful applications
      • Clearer Thinking FTX regranting (unsuccessful)
      • FTX Future Fund (for further funding; unsuccessful)
      • Sloan
  • Parallel/partner initiatives and resources
    • eLife
    • Peer Communities In
    • Sciety
    • Asterisk
    • Related: EA/global priorities seminar series
    • EA and EA Forum initiatives
      • EA forum peer reviewing (related)
      • Links to EA Forum/"EA journal"
    • Other non-journal evaluation
    • Economics survey (Charness et al.)
  • Management details [mostly moved to Coda]
    • Governance of The Unjournal
    • Status, expenses, and payments
    • Evaluation manager process
      • Choosing evaluators (considerations)
        • Avoiding COI
        • Tips and text for contacting evaluators (private)
    • UJ Team: resources, onboarding
    • Policies/issues discussion
    • Research scoping discussion spaces
    • Communication and style
  • Tech, tools and resources
    • Tech scoping
    • Hosting & platforms
      • PubPub
      • Kotahi/Sciety (phased out)
        • Kotahi: submit/eval/mgmt (may be phasing out?)
        • Sciety (host & curate evals)
    • This GitBook; editing it, etc
    • Other tech and tools
      • Cryptpad (for evaluator or other anonymity)
      • hypothes.is for collab. annotation
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  1. Our policies: evaluation & workflow
  2. Evaluation

Protecting anonymity

PreviousWhy pay evaluators (reviewers)?NextMapping evaluation workflow

Last updated 1 year ago

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The Unjournal Evaluators have the option of remaining anonymous (see ). Where evaluators choose this, we will carefully protect this anonymity, aiming at a high standard of protection, as good as or better than traditional journals. We will give evaluators the option to take extra steps to safeguard this further. We are offering anonymity in perpetuity to those who request it. (As well as anonymity on other terms to those who request it, on explicitly mutually agreed upon terms.)

If they choose to stay anonymous, there should be no way for authors to be able to ‘guess’ who has reviewed their work.

Some key principles/rules

  1. We will take steps to keep private any information that could connect the identity of an anonymous evaluator and their evaluation/the work they are evaluating.

  2. We will take extra steps to make the possibility of accidental disclosure extremely small (this is never impossible of course, even in the case of conventional journal reviews). In particular, we will use pseudonyms or ID codes for these evaluators in any discussion or database that is shared among our management team that connects individual evaluators to research work.

  3. If we ever share a list of Unjournal’s evaluators this will not include anyone who wished to remain anonymous (unless they explicitly ask us to be on such a list).

  4. We will do our best to warn anonymous evaluators of ways that they might inadvertently be identifying themselves in the evaluation content they provide.

  5. We will provide platforms to enable anonymous and secure discussion between anonymous evaluators and others (authors, editors, etc.) Where an anonymous evaluator is involved, we will encourage these platforms to be used as much as possible. In particular, see .

Aside: In future, we may consider , and these tools will also be

our (proposed) use of Cryptpad
#anonymity-blinding-vs.-signed-reports
allowing Evaluation Managers (formerly 'managing editors') to remain anonymous