How does the dual-anonymous peer-review process work, and how do I ensure my proposal complies with it?

ESO is strongly committed to ensuring that the proposal review process is as fair and impartial as possible. Analyses of proposal rankings in previous Periods have identified systematics that may indicate the presence of biases in the review process (Patat et al. 2016 and Carpenter 2020). To further minimise sucge biases, ESO has adopted a dual-anonymous peer review approach for allocating telescope time starting from P110. For a detailed instruction, please refer to the ESO Distributed Peer Review (DPR).

In the ESO DPR, the identities of proposers and reviewers are kept confidential: proposers do not know who is reviewing their proposal, and reviewers do not know the identities of the proposers. While proposers will still enter their names and affiliations in the Phase 1 portal, this information will not appear on the proposal cover sheet, or in the tools used by the reviewers. It is the responsibility of the proposers to ensure that anonymity is preserved throughout their proposal text.

General guidelines, including examples of how to write proposals that comply with the dual-anonymous review process are provided here. This includes a list of Frequently Asked Questions. For any additional questions you can contact us via our Helpdesk.