Purpose of the Working Group

We're working on a plan for implementing anonymous proposal reviews beginning with the Cycle 26 HST TAC process. This includes,

• a plan for proposal reviews, from close of the phase I submissions to TAC selection.
• instructions to proposers on how to make to write anonymous proposals
• instructions to the TAC, panels, and chairs on how to review anonymous proposals
• information to the community on the issues with single-blinded peer reviews, and the solutions double-blinded reviews should address.

The document with our charge, Working Group on Anonymous Proposing v1.pdf

Presentations

Statistics on HST proposal success rates, proposal statistics.ppt

Stefanie Johnsons's Presentation on Gender Bias in Hubble Proposal Ratings, Hubble Presentation.pptx

The HST Proposal Process and Review

The HST Call formally describes the proposal process and review policies each cycle. In particular, Chapter 6.1 covers how the reviews are done, and Chapter 6.2 discusses the selection criteria we expect panel reviewers and the TAC to evaluate on. The Science Policies Group Site has much more technical information on the HST peer review, including more detailed guidelines to reviewers, presentations provided at orientation on the observatory status and science activities, lists of previous panelists and chairs, and the proposal processing procedures. 

Articles on Double-Blinded Reviews

The STScI Chief Librarian, Jenny Novacescu, has complied a few articles on double-blind peer reviews that should be useful in our discussions. They are available on https://stsci.box.com/s/ls9n3etdbcnwbukmdq3nclpzrlf7kx85

Before diving into these articles, a place to start might be this article in Science Magazine. A question I had in reading this is if we had an optional anonymous submission option, as a compromise, would anyone use it?

In the document “Anonymous-Double Blind Review Annotated Bibliography.docx” Jenny has thankfully provided some crib notes on each of the articles.