Peer review in Croatian scholarly journals : the potential of open peer review

There are 441 journals on the Hrčak portal. They cover all disciplines and are available in open access. We send an online questionnaire to editors of all dhe journals. The questions were about: acceptance rate, peer review type, instructions for peer reviewers, automated peer review tool, number of reviewers in journal’s database, duration of peer review process, implementation of international recommendations on peer review, about ethical issues, publishing submission and/or acceptance dates, editorial freedom and integrity etc. The data was collected from February to June 2017. Results show that most journals from the fields of humanities and social sciences conduct double blind peer review, and journals from other fields (biotechnology, technology, medicine, science) mostly conduct single blind peer review. Editors are in general very satisfied with the quality of the submitted reviews. Peer reviewers meet the deadlines, but it is not always easy to find competent peer reviewers. In about 10% of journals peer reviewers have to declare conflict of interest. Eighty percent of journals publish detailed instructions for peer reviewers and 43% of journals explain ethical issues in the instructions. Open peer review is not accepted in Croatian journals and some editors are not familiar with the concept of open peer review. Only 7% of the editors strongly agree that open peer review would enhance the peer review quality. Automated publishing systems (such as Open Journals System) are becoming more popular if compared to previous researches. When asked about process of acceptance, editors claim that mean number of days from submission to publishing decision is about 140. Journals from the field of humanities and social sciences have acceptance rate around 45%, and from the other fields around 35%. In conclusion, we can say that majority of journals have high level of editorial freedom and integrity but there is a need to raise awareness of the new forms of peer review as well as of the importance of the transparent guidelines for the reviewers