Submitters have the option to view all their private experiments and array designs in BioStudies. This requires a BioStudies account, which we will create at the time of loading the experiment into the database. When you submit, you can specify the email address for the BioStudies account, by selecting the contact with the "submitter" role. Note: This does not need to be the same as the Annotare account holder and means that the Annotare submitter may give access to another person to make post-submission updates.
Please refer to the BioStudies help on accessing private data for more information on how to activate the account.
Submitters can share access to a private ArrayExpress dataset. Follow the instructions here to activate the BioStudies account and get the access link for reviewers.
To reduce potential bias during peer review, some journals now offer manuscript depositors the option of "double-blind" peer review, where a depositor remains anonymous to the reviewer. ArrayExpress supports "double-blind" peer review of private data sets by redacting certain metadata fields which would inevitably reveal the submitter's identity, e.g. "Contacts" (name and email address), "Citation" (contains preliminary publication title and author list). The redaction is an optional feature at submitter's request, and only applies when a reviewer is accessing the ArrayExpress experiment of interest (detected by the reviewer's login name), so the submitter (using their dedicated login) will continue to see the full metadata record. Anonymity can also be lifted at submitter's request, e.g. when the manuscript is submitted to a journal which does not support "double-blind" peer review. Finally, submitter anonymity will be lifted completely once the experiment goes public.
If you are the submitter of a previously non-anonymised private data set in ArrayExpress and would like to switch on anonymity or vice versa, please write to us at annotare@ebi.ac.uk.