Chinese Authors Are Less Likely to Opt In to Publishing Peer Review Reports
Since 2019, the academic publisher PLOS has allowed authors to choose whether to publish peer review reports alongside their manuscripts. Between 35% and 40% of authors have opted to do so in recent years, although the share has declined slightly from its 2023 peak of 38.8%.
However, this share varies across authors working in different fields and from different countries. Authors in nursing, health, medicine, and psychology were more likely to publish peer review reports alongside their manuscripts, whereas authors in chemistry, energy, and engineering were less likely to do so.
Country-level differences were also evident. Authors from Ethiopia were among the most willing to publish peer review reports: about 56.4% of them did so, followed by authors from Denmark (54.4%), the Netherlands (49.9%), the UK (48.3%), and Bangladesh (48.2%). In contrast, Chinese authors were less willing to do so. Although Chinese authors published 15,128 articles in PLOS ONE between 2020 and 2025, only 30.7% of them opted in to publishing peer review reports, far lower than the global average of 38.2%.