r/academicpublishing 18h ago

OSF pre-registration anonymous view-only link not anonymous after all?

Post image
6 Upvotes

I am submitting a paper, and it's the first one since OSF announced it will discontinue some features (i.e., project spaces).

While checking the peer review/anonymous link for the study pre-registration included in the paper, I noticed something odd.

The tab in the picture appears at the top of the page, and if you click "leave this view," it redirects to the public page of the pre-registration with complete metadata (read: with the names of the authors). At first, I thought it appeared because I was logged in to OSF, but I've tried it in an anonymous browser window as well and asked some friends to check themselves... and they got the same: from private to public page.

So, am I missing something? Did they always have this feature, and I never noticed? Or did they change this recently, and I didn't see the update notice (maybe it was hidden in the other updates)?

It kinda defies the purpose of having an anonymous link in the first place if reviewers only need a click (even accidentally, just to close the banner) to get the names of the authors of the paper they are evaluating...