How does it work dual anonymous peer-review and how do I adhere to it?

ESO is strongly committed to ensuring that the proposal review process is as fair and impartial as possible. Analysis of the proposal rankings in previous Periods has identified systematics that may signify the presence of biases in the review process (Patat et al. 2016 and Carpenter 2020). To ensure that the proposal review process is as fair and unbiased as possible, ESO has decided to move to the dual-anonymous peer review approach for allocating its telescope time from P107. Please, have a look at ESO Distributed Peer Review (DPR) for a detailed introduction to the new approach.

In the ESO DPR, the proposal team does not know the identity of the reviewers and the reviewers do not know the identity of the proposal team. While proposers will still enter their names and affiliations in the ESO Phase 1 proposal, this information will not appear on the proposal cover sheet, nor in the tools used by the reviewers. It is the responsibility of the proposers to ensure anonymity is preserved when writing their proposals.

General guidelines, including examples, on how to write a proposal that meet the requirements for the dual-anonymous review process are provided here. This includes a list of Frequently Asked Questions. For any additional questions you can contact the Helpdesk.