Today is the day! Submissions are now open for our new Planetary Science Journal! Please submit papers at https://journals.aas.org/planetary-science-journal/
The DPS Committee cares about our membership and about inclusivity in our field. To take steps to address implicit bias in publishing, our new Planetary Science Journal (PSJ) will implement Dual Anonymous Review as a default practice.
A position paper on Dual Anonymous Review (DAR), assembled by the DPS Professional Culture and Climate Subcommittee and supported by the DPS Publications Subcommittee, is available here https://dps.aas.org/sites/dps.aas.org/files/professional-climate/PCCS-DAR_2019-11-06.pdf. The paper points out that “reviewers may unwittingly be subject to implicit bias ... which may be positive or negative, [and] may affect the review process and the final decision whether to publish the paper or not.” Furthermore, several "studies show that DAR does decrease bias.”
The standard practice will be to keep authors and reviewers anonymous. However, DPS members should be aware, as they submit manuscripts to the PSJ, that DAR is not mandatory, and authors may choose to identify themselves. Most importantly, those authors who may be most impacted by negative biases have the ability to stay anonymous, because the intent is that most of the manuscripts are also anonymous, just like with reviews.
We recognize that this is a change to how our field has customarily written manuscripts. To implement the default DAR policy, the PSJ will provide guidelines for authors that will provide best practices for how to write your manuscripts in a way so as to not identify yourself. Authors who wish to identify themselves may take steps to do so, and any activities they undertake outside the review process that might identify themselves to potential reviewers are allowed (e.g., posting their paper to a preprint server like astro-ph, or distributing draft copies of their manuscripts at conferences, etc.).
The DPS Committee is proud to take steps to address potential bias in our field by supporting the default DAR policy at the PSJ and thanks the PCCS and PubSubComm for their work in this area.
Amanda Hendrix
DPS Chair
2 Dec 2019