ALMA is strongly committed to ensuring that the proposal review process is as fair and impartial as possible. Analysis of the proposal rankings in previous cycles has identified systematics that may signify the presence of biases in the review process (Carpenter 2020). To ensure that the proposal review process is as fair and unbiased as possible, ALMA is beginning dual-anonymous review in Cycle 8 2021. 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. While proposers will still enter their names and affiliations in the ALMA Observing Tool (OT), this information will not appear on the proposal cover sheet, nor in the tools used by the reviewers. It is the responsibility of the proposers to ensure anonymity is preserved when writing their proposals.
General guidelines, including examples, on how to write a proposal that meet the requirements for the dual-anonymous review process are provided on the Science Portal. This includes a list of Frequently Asked Questions. For any additional questions you can contact the Helpdesk and specify the Project Handling department.