Who chooses open peer review and is it an indicator of article quality? An observational study of PLOS journals.

PLOS journals allow authors of accepted articles to choose whether the peer review will be openly published alongside the article. This creates an observational study to examine the characteristics of authors and articles that more often choose open peer review, and whether open review is associated with measures of article quality. We examined over 115,000 PLOS articles and estimated what characteristics of the articles were associated with open peer review. We also examined if open peer review was associated with the subsequent retraction of the article and the number of citations.Forty percent of articles chose open peer review. Authors from the UK, France, the Netherlands, and Ethiopia were more likely to choose open peer review. In contrast, authors from Saudi Arabia, the Republic of Korea, Pakistan, Poland, and China were less likely to choose open review. Authors with an edu email were less likely to choose open review, whilst authors with a gmail were more likely. Articles with open peer review were less likely to be retracted (adjusted hazard ratio = 0.75, 95% CI 0.60 to 0.93) and had more citations on average (adjusted rate ratio = 1.07, 95% CI 1.05 to 1.09).In this exploratory study, we found clear differences in participation in open reviews with strong differences between countries. Authors who have confidence in their article and who engage in other open science practices may be more likely to chose open peer review, making this choice an indicator of article quality.