Blinded decision letter to reviewers
It would be useful to be able to send a blinded decision letter to reviewers that does not reveal the author name. There are no easy ways to do this at the moment (I can think of 3 workarounds but they are time-consuming or clumsy). This would tie in neatly with being able to send letters to reviewers of all versions for which there is currently no tag. (this is also very time-consuming to get around). And of course it would include any attachments that were on the original decision letter.
Yes please - this would help with GDPR too. Even with single-blind we don't want reviewers to see authors email addresses
I agree. We are forwarding each decision letter to reviewer and removing the salutation to the author. Doing this also means we have to manually pull each reviewer's email address and paste into the bcc field. If ScholarOne could do as Editorial Manager and mask the author's email address and the salutation, it would eliminate this time-consuming extra step (we send 1,000 decisions annually) and reduce the likelihood of human error that would reveal the author's identity to reviewers.
Yes, I agree whole-heartedly! The workaround we came up with was to address decision letters to "Dear Author" which is awkward and impersonal. Editorial Manager is able to do this by sending an email to the reviewers in which the author's email address and name are replaced by asterisks. Scholar One should be able to do the same.