 Identity in peer review is something that particularly early career researchers or researchers who are from minority backgrounds, whether that is people who are from countries were actually they're not a minority at all worldwide, but they are from countries that are viewed less hospitably by some of the western English speaking nations so shall we say countries where their research is not viewed necessarily as as good when actually it's perfectly on par so they have quite legitimate reason for sometimes not wanting to be identified during the review process because there is a quite real role going on which is that all of us have unconscious biases, all of us around minorities around nationalities etc and the paper will come in you'll see what country it's from or university it's from or even what group it's from, and judgments get made one way or the other and just from so and so group they've got a Nobel Prize this must be good. Who says it is that's what peer review is for, I shouldn't be perceiving that as an editor or as a reviewer without actually looking at the content of the paper. There's a great issue around it from that point of view of benefiting people because we know who they are, or they're a friend of ours, or someone we worked with long ago so we can legitimately review their work, or someone we're trying to impress. Similarly, there are a lot of papers where the paper itself is actually really good. It's just that people will see the nationality of the authors, or they will, in some cases, see that it's female authors and they will make conscious biases in many cases that they have against those minority groups which is obviously wrong and obviously something we don't want to be happening. I think I've been thinking about for about seven or eight years now since I became editor-in-chief in 2014 of finding a way that we could do peer review where identity didn't come into it and we could find a way to make it blind in both directions. From January 2022 Femmes Microbiology Letters is going to start a double blind peer review process. This will mean that authors will submit their manuscripts in more or less the same way that they do now. There will be a few things that are a bit different and that will go to an editor as normal. The editor will know who the authors are. They will be able to see everything. The authors will not know who the reviewers are, just as they don't know, but the reviewers will also not know who the authors are or where they're from. So it will take out a lot of biases from the system, which is obviously a great thing and it will mean hopefully that the authors will receive to be probably a small number of papers overall, which have judgments made on them on the basis of things other than their content, whether that's good or bad. It will mean that those papers get a fair shot, and that fair shot being either that they get properly reviewed and accepted because they're good work, but people might have biases against the authors for whatever reason, or the other way round it's perceived as to be high value because of who wrote it rather than actually the content of it itself. So our reviewers won't have any idea who the authors of the work are or their institution. What that will mean for authors when they're submitting is that effectively acknowledgments will be in a separate file to the manuscript addresses and names will be in a separate file to the manuscript, and we'll be providing some advisory notes to enable authors to essentially blank out redact sections of the manuscript that say things like what are our previous 10 studies in this area and then you cite them all to make it less obvious who the authors are now we know if a reviewer goes through it and sees the same author name cropping up a lot of times in recent work that's been done in this area they could guess that it might be the author of this paper. It might not be it might just be another person who's working on it so it will mean that if a reviewer honestly has the time on their hands to try making most kinds of judgments they could actually be outdoing someone or benefiting someone completely different from who they perceive it to be. So we will do everything we can to make sure that the authors manuscript is as blinded as it can be when it gets into the hands of reviewers but for the time being, at least for the next year our journal will only be double blind so the editor will know all the authors information. We have discussed whether going triple blind as it's called, which is where I would know as editor in chief but the handling editor would not know who the authors are so they'd be in the same position as the reviewers. We have discussed it and on balance we didn't feel it's something we want to do at the moment because it creates quite a big administrative burden and it will make things quite difficult to deal with when we have to communicate with an author. Everything will have to be done through manuscript central and author won't be able to email an editor in the way that they can now so we don't want to do that yet but it's something that's certainly not completely off the table and we are thinking about for the future. What I call eddie, Edie, which is equality, diversity, dignity in the workplace, inclusivity and equity is really, really important to me as an LGBTQIA plus academic who is also heavily disabled on the one hand and on the other hand is still a white man. So I have a lot of privileges on one hand and on the other hand, some disadvantages, and I'm very conscious of this in review in editorial practice and so on, and trying to find ways we can be more inclusive. A couple of years ago for the first time in the journals history we accepted an anonymous manuscript, and that was done for reasons of equity. It was done for reasons of a PhD student who was denied entry to the UK to attend a conference because of the country that they came from. And we wanted to report that we wanted to make sure people read it we wanted to make sure it was known, but that student did not want to risk push back in the future, they did not want to risk our board agency finding further reasons not to admit them. So I took the step of allowing them to submit it anonymously and doing that enabled their story to be told, and it protected them. And it's been a very well talked about paper on social media so I think it is quite an important thing to do to find ways in which we can create inclusivity that historically did not exist. In terms of fostering greater diversity, equity, etc in peer review. We do try when we pick up peer reviewers to pick experts who are publishing actively in a given area. We don't have a database of reviewers as such. So when I get emails every week saying can I be on your database of reviewers we don't have one. So what we do is paper comes in and it's on alcohol dehydrogenases in bacteria. We would, or the handling editor would look at who is publishing in that area at the moment who is actively publishing, and we'll take first authors or senior authors from those papers typically as reviewers, or sometimes they would take a renowned expert who is someone near to retirement age, who is very very established in that area. And because of the historical biases of science the latter group are predominantly white middle class heterosexual able bodied, etc, cisgendered men. And that creates a lot of unconscious biases in itself. There is also the problem that if you look at how academia looks or research in general looks generally in the biological sciences there are a lot of women at degree level, and a small number of women going to do PhDs, and then on to do postdocs. And some get as far as very junior academic positions, but often then leave academia or research completely around that point. So you don't see a huge number of women in senior roles. So whenever we're looking at senior authors on papers, we are biasing against women by doing that. And one of the things that I also using first authors which are the people on the bench doing the work that we kind of offset that in a way, but it's something that we need to consciously think about as editors and it's something that we need to do when we're picking our reviewers. I've picked a white man, I need to find someone that's not a white man. Sometimes that is actually easy. Sometimes it's incredibly difficult. Sometimes. There are some names from some countries, I can't predict the gender of the individual, or the biological sex of the individual, and if I were to Google that person I'll find loads of people with the same name so I can't always know. So in the case of gender, what the gender of an author is, unless they're active on social media and have lots of photos on the internet, but I can go by it is quite difficult so we have to start where we can. And I think one problem that we've always had as a journal since I took it over in 2014 is we don't have a huge global diversity of handling editors. We do, we have handling editors in lots of different countries, but we've tried repeatedly to recruit handling editors from Africa and from Central America and South America. And there's a lot of general interest people kind of are wanting to do it, but as soon as it comes down to okay well this is the role, this is what we would need you to do. People don't want to do it anymore. And we don't really fully understand why that is. And that affects us because it means we don't have a person on the ground in a given continent or a given region where we can say look there's a conference in that area can you attend it on behalf of the editors you're nearby. It affects us in that way it also affects us in not having intelligence about trends and current hot topics in that given area that would help us again a lot but in terms of editorial practice. It certainly impacts us in many ways of not having that huge diversity of editors, but it is something that we are conscious of and every time an editor has left the editorial board. We've been trying to recruit people who are not straight white heterosexual cis men, as much as I can because we've got a very large number of them, and we need to kind of balance things out as much as possible. And that works with mixed ability because we're always recruiting for a very specific role, we need a handling editor that can deal with this particular area. I had a male handling editor leave earlier this year for quite legitimate reasons after a few years on the editorial board. And I couldn't find anybody at all of any gender who could do what he did which was two quite separate areas of the same area of microbiology. We were not into women instead, who could do half each, and that worked. So not trying to do like for like, IE one out one in going one out will have two people or three people to cover that instead. So we can split it up. I've found I'm trying to find a way around it and bring in more people, but it is difficult, and it is something we're very conscious of and I've been very conscious of it all the way back to 2014, when I took over the journal, and it's taken all this time to get as far as we've got with it and what you can't do and what I don't want to do is consciously get rid of handling editors and just say what we're having a color of handling editors, you all have to go. When they're great committed people who've been with us for a long time. We also don't want to put a term on handling editors and say, you only serve a five years or 10 years because some of our best handling editors have been with us 25 years or more. And that's not something we would ever really want to do either. So finding ways to build in that diversity of editors is not as straightforward as you would think unless you were to get rid of a whole editorial board and start from scratch, which is not something I would ever dream of doing it's going to be existing editors as much as anything else, but we do naturally have editors who stand down a few a year for quite legitimate reasons, others just want to take a temporary break. And we always do try to recruit to replace with some level of greater diversity than what we've already got. As reviewers, we always try and aim for as much diversity as we can but what we have to be very conscious of is, there are very few types of diversity that are visible when you're searching for a reviewer. I was looking for a reviewer for a paper, and I was thinking, actually I need to try and try and get some balance to my reviewers. In some cases, but not all cases, I could see a picture of the reviewer online somewhere which might tell me what I perceive their gender to be, not necessarily what they would label their gender as. They're putting their pronouns after their names on their websites, which is great because then you know what gender they actually are, and that makes things a lot easier. I can tell from their name or perhaps from where they did their first degree if it's on their website or their biography, what country they're originally from, often they still work in the country they're originally from. If I do that, I can see from when they did their PhD, kind of what career stage they are at. What I can't tell in the majority of cases is I'm not able to tell whether someone is transgender, because unless they disclose that information, I wouldn't know. I can't tell what someone's sexual orientation is because unless they disclose it, I wouldn't know. I can't tell whether they're disabled, because unless they disclose it, I wouldn't know. I can't tell the socioeconomic background of their family, because unless they disclose it, I wouldn't know. Likewise, religion, political belief, etc, etc, which are all under the nine protected criteria for diversity that most countries seem to work with or to some degree have adopted. So whilst on the one hand it's great to say we need to include more diversity, we have to be very aware that what most people mean when they talk about diversity boils down to perceived gender and perceived race or perceived country of origin. It doesn't always go much deeper than that and into the other categories. So it can be difficult. And certainly if I got a submission in from an early career academic or an early career postdoc or PhD student, who I happened to know was very active on social media and had a website. I knew that they were involved in things like the 500 queer scientists initiative or in the disabled scientists initiative, or I've seen them talk about those topics. I might consciously think I'm going to try and get reviewers that might understand perhaps why that field work was a bit limited because they couldn't do that whole track in one day or whatever. But 99% of the time we don't know that about the individual so it's very, very hard for us to do any kind of diversity beyond the basics, which are being done and that's great in one sense we really do need to tackle the issue around biases around race or origin and biases around perceived gender. And I say perceived gender because the gender a person is and the gender they are when I look at them without asking them are two different things. They've got to be tackle those are really big issues but we must never forget about all the other types of diversity that there are in this wonderfully diverse world of science that we are in. And we often forget that they exist, let alone think about ways that we can be more inclusive or more equitable to those individuals. So in terms of peer review practice for journals. I think what we've all got to consciously do for picking two reviewers or four reviewers, try and make sure they're not gender balance is always a difficult thing because that implies there are two genders. But certainly make sure they're not all white men that can be done. That's not difficult to do. In most cases, certainly try and make sure that if the author principal author is clearly from a minority group and we know about it to try and make sure at least one reviewer is from the same minority group if we can, because it means that we've got someone who might understand why certain things could be done or couldn't be done. There are many, many enzymes that are used in laboratories which are animal products and certain religious groups will not use them so there are some experiments that that individual or people in that particular country can't use. And we need to remember that we need to keep it in mind when we're reviewing papers. But to do that requires some knowledge and some understanding of those limitations and the kind of thing a lot of us would not even think about. And I'll be honest, I didn't think about until I had a PhD student from the Middle East, who said, I can't work with that enzyme because of the animal that it's from. And we managed to find a recombinant version, more expensive, but we managed to find one. So they could do the work, but that's not always the case. And it is difficult sometimes to try and find a solution. And I think it's something we're still across academia and across research still very much finding our feet with as whilst equality and diversity, etc. And being talked about well over 20 years. I think there's been a big change in the last five years, certainly a big change in the way the general public are starting to get a better understanding of these things. And I'm hoping it's going to percolate through to academia research and to journals. As it percolates through to fighting general.