Dual Anonymous Peer Review

The SSC has adopted a dual-anonymous review process to reduce bias and ensure reviewers focus on the scientific merit rather than the proposing team, and this page provides the guidelines and description of how the process works.



Roman Anonymous Proposal Reviews

The SSC is responsible for ensuring that the community has equal opportunity access to use the Roman Space Telescope and that the best science will be selected, given the limited resources available. The SSC places a high value on the equity and integrity of the proposal review process.

The focus of the TAC review is to recommend the best science. The identity of the proposing team should not be a consideration in making this judgement. Based on the analysis of data from past NASA ROSES and other reviews, systematic demographic differences in proposal success were noted, suggesting that unconscious bias may play a role in the proposal review deliberations. Several studies have also shown that a reviewer's attitude toward a submission may be affected, even unconsciously, by the identity of the principal investigator. Independent studies of previous NASA telescope proposal reviews suggested that a dual-anonymous process may help resolve this inequity, and may balance out other areas of potential bias.

The dual-anonymous system has been successfully used in various NASA proposal reviews, and will be adopted for Roman proposal peer reviews as well. The goal of the Dual Anonymous Peer Review is to enable each reviewer to focus on the science, and not on the proposing team. A summary of the dual-anonymous process guidelines, along with a description of how the review process works, is given below.

For more details, please refer to the NASA ROSES guidelines.


Dual-Anonymous Guidelines

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope project is strongly committed to ensuring that the proposal review process is as fair and impartial as possible. To reduce any biases as much as possible, proposals are to be written in an anonymous fashion. In a dual-anonymous review, the proposal team does not know the identity of the reviewers, and the reviewers do not know the identity of the proposal team. The primary goal of the dual-anonymous review is to have reviewers focus on the scientific merit of the proposal rather than the proposal team. While proposers enter their names and affiliations in the Roman Telescope Proposal System (RTPS), this information will not appear on the proposal cover sheet, nor in the tools used by the reviewers, until the ranking has been determined. Upon completion of the peer review process, the identity of the proposers of the successful proposals will be revealed to the Time Allocation Committee (TAC) such that the qualifications of the proposing team can be verified, before the final selection of approved Roman programs is made by the Project Science Office Selection Official. It is the responsibility of the proposers to ensure that anonymity is preserved in the information provided in the cover sheet, and when preparing the science justification document.

Review Process

 The Roman Cycle 1 proposal call adopts the dual anonymous review process to ensure that all the proposals are evaluated fairly and without bias.

  1. Proposers prepare an anonymized science justification following the dual-anonymous guidelines described below. The science justification document includes science, analysis, and implementation plans. The science justification portion of the proposal is shared with the TAC.
  2. Proposers submit a team expertise document as an attachment in RTPS. This document provides details on the team's qualifications and relevant experience to conduct the proposed investigation. It may include the names and affiliations of at least the key members of the proposal team. This information is reviewed by the TAC only after the initial scientific evaluation has been used to rank the proposal to confirm that the selected proposals have the necessary expertise and institutional support for successful execution.

Guidelines are provided below on how to write proposals in an anonymous fashion. Most of the changes are in the writing style, including references.

General Guidelines pertaining to all proposals

  • Do not identify the PI or any co-Is in the proposal. This includes the proposal cover sheet and the scientific justification. Proposers should use third person or neutral wording when referencing their own work. 

For example, instead of

“In Smith et al. (2018), we demonstrated…” proposers can include references in the following formats:

“As demonstrated in Smith et al. (2018),…” or

“As demonstrated in [1],…” where [1] corresponds to the full citation in a reference list.

  • Do not refer to software or data from Roman or any other observatories in a self-identifying fashion. Software and datasets that are available in a public repository (e.g., GitHub) or in a public paper can be referenced by normal practices. Software or datasets that are not public can be referenced as “obtained via private communications” or similar language, but a name should not be specified since it could strongly imply who may be an investigator on the proposal.

Example 1: instead of “Figure 1 shows the image from our Roman program (PID 5005, PI Smith).” proposers can write

    “Figure 1 shows the image from the Roman program PID 5005” or

    “Figure 1 shows the data from a Roman program (private communication).”

Example 2: instead of “We will combine these Roman observations with the JWST program led by J. Abrahamson et al...” or

    “The proposed Roman observations will be combined with our JWST data…” proposers can write

    “We will combine these Roman observations with the JWST observations (JWST program id XXX).” or

    “The proposed Roman observations will be combined with available JWST data (private communication)…”

Example 3: instead of “We use our group’s redshit determination package REDDER…” or

    “We use the redshift identification package by co-I Tina Tegler…” proposers can write

    “We use the redshift identification package REDDER (obtained via private communication)…”

More examples: instead of

    “Our Cycle 1 program showed…”

    “The data from our pilot program…”

    “Our previous redshift survey…”

proposers can write

    “The data from a Cycle 1 program (private communication)…”

    “The data from program PID 5432…”

    “The survey from Gulliver et al. (2026)…”

  • Do not list the name of the PI when listing a proposal project, even if the proposal is not your own.
  • Do not list the name of the person when referencing “private communication.”
  • Do not provide links to personal web pages or the web pages of project teams.
  • References to papers in preparation need to be referenced as "private communication."

For example, instead of: “Figure 1 shows the galaxy redshift range from Keto et al. (in preparation).”

proposers can write “Figure 1 shows the galaxy redshift range (private communication).”

    • References to papers that have been submitted are not permitted unless they are available on public archives (e.g., arXiv), in which case the archive paper can be referenced following normal practices.
    • Do not include personal acknowledgments or the source of any grant funding that may identify the proposers.

Example text

Here is example text that would need to be modified according to the guidelines, with the text to be changed in bold:

“We propose to perform a multi-band survey of the outer regions of nearby isolated galaxies in order to obtain the first complete survey of faint structures in the nearby Universe. To obtain a sense of the stellar populations of the faint structures, we will scan the galaxies in four different bands. From our previous Roman observations (Wallace et al. 2027), we estimate that by including bands F062 and F213 we will be able to maximize the stellar population diagnostics. Our pioneering studies of low surface brightness multi-band observations (e.g., Kerner et al. 2026) show that the inclusion of the maximum wavelength range will give the best handle to eliminate extinction effects and can lead to a considerable improvement in the reliability of stellar population diagnostics.”

Here is the same text revised according to the guidelines:

“We propose to perform a multi-band survey of the outer regions of nearby isolated galaxies in order to obtain the first complete survey of faint structures in the nearby Universe.  To obtain a sense of the stellar populations of the faint structures, we will scan the galaxies in four different bands. Based on previous Roman observations (Wallace et al. 2027), we estimate that by including bands F062 and F213 we will be able to maximize the stellar population diagnostics. Previous studies of low surface brightness multi-band observations (e.g., Kerner et al. 2026) show that the inclusion of the maximum wavelength range will give the best handle to eliminate extinction effects and can lead to a considerable improvement in the reliability of stellar population diagnostics.”

Compliance

PIs are required to anonymize their proposals. Reviewers will be instructed to notify the Roman SSC of any proposals that appear to violate the dual-anonymous guidelines. The Roman SSC will follow up on each reported case. Any proposal that contains significant violations of the dual-anonymous guidelines may be rejected. PIs will be provided with feedback regarding any detected violations to avoid similar violations in future cycles. If this is the case, such information will be included in the notification letter as a Note from the TAC.

In some cases, a proposal may be very specialized, and the identity of the proposal team may seem obvious to the reviewers even after the text has been anonymized. As long as the guidelines to anonymize the proposals are followed, the proposal will not be considered to be in violation.