... so GitHub is COMPLETELY public?

[MarcoViola88]

Hi @DominiqueMakowski , if I am correct, all our discussions on GitHub are accessible to anybody, right? If so, I might have realized that just now XD I wonder whether you were planning to restrict the access of some parts of the discussions between project members ... or do you propose to stay fully visible? I don't think we've written anything inappropriate (we're good guys after all!), but what about ensuring anonymity for peer review?

[DominiqueMakowski]

Yes it is totally public in theory (in practice, Github stuff and especially issues are not well references by google, so it's often weirdly hard to find it even when you type very specific keywords) - and even people that are supposed to be following are often not notified of new discussions etc. So as far as I'm concerned, it's not public enough 😁

Joke aside, if you're worried, you can always edit/delete/hide comments.

That said it's my fault I should have made that explicit when we started that everything we discuss in this repo is public. We could technically have another private repo for private discussions, but so far I'm not sure there is a need (in fact, I really like this transparency and traceability of the whole process I think this is how science should always be). Here we have a track of our whole discussion, debate, thought process and of the history of the project and I think it's beautiful.

do you propose to stay fully visible?

I don't mind leaving it as-is, and private conversations can be carried out by email. But again, if you prefer, we could consider creating a private repo (we can't make this one private now as we can only hosts the experiment on public ones)

but what about ensuring anonymity for peer review?

This is a general problem: double-blind peer review is fundamentally incompatible with open science, and this problem already has everyday consequences (it my case I've been asked a couple of times to "blindly" review a paper that I've read the preprint of before, so the whole "blind review" was impossible). And if we have to choose between the two, I side with openness and transparency rather than anonymity (I tend also to be a partisan of signing my reviews).

But aside from that ideological rant, the short answer is no we can't ensure anonimity (same as any papers that are released as preprints - i.e., most of them nowadays)

[MarcoViola88]

Thanks for the clarification -- and indeed, thank you for the 'ideological rant': I also perceive the inherent tension, and by reading someone's opinion I feel less alone in this "feeling torn apart" (Be transparent! But also, be anonymous!)

At some point, I'll go through the older discussions to check whether some of our discussions were politically incorrect -- since we'll all become very famous scientists after this study, I don't want someone to ridicule me for some jokes I've made about studying porn XD (I'm half-joking, but also half-worried that people in academia may be less progressive than they pretend to be).

Thank you for the clarification and for the hard work -- I'm going back to Data collection and marking this thread completed