Obvious authorship and “blind” peer peview Need to publish results of one my research in a journal. Springer’s manuscript guidelines prompt me to make a blinded manuscript containing no author information, but links in the References section (this one and to my images published with explicitly advertized authorship) quickly reveal who the author is.

Should the author
 formally obey the blindness rule and ignore its silliness in the conditions given,
 or replace such references (at least for the peer-review time) with some stuff included directly,
 or what?

Would it be acceptable to hold the paper/preprint accessible by URL (especially with links from third-party sites) during expected peer review?
I have reviewed papers, where some of the references are blinded as well. So that is one way of doing it, and that certainly happens. Sometimes the authors and the journal are more lax. There are pros and cons to blind reviewing, but if a journal chooses to use blind reviewing, then I would prefer it be done consistently. However, if, after carefully reading the materials for the authors, you are still unsure what to do, then you can always contact the editor about this.