Publish peer reviews

Jessica K. Polka and colleagues call on journals to sign a pledge to make reviewers’ anonymous comments part of the official scientific record.
By
  1. Jessica K. Polka

    1. Jessica K. Polka is executive director of ASAPbio in San Francisco, California, USA.

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  2. Robert Kiley

    1. Robert Kiley is head of open research at the Wellcome Trust in London.

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  3. Boyana Konforti

    1. Boyana Konforti is director of scientific strategy and development at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, USA.

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  4. Bodo Stern

    1. Bodo Stern is chief development and strategy officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, USA.

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  5. Ronald D. Vale

    1. Ronald D. Vale is president of ASAPbio in San Francisco, California, USA; a professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco; and an HHMI investigator.

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Illustration by David Parkins

Long shrouded in secrecy, the contents of peer review are coming into the open. In the past decade, outlets such aseLife,F1000Research,Royal Society Open Science,Annals of Anatomy,Nature Communications,PeerJ and EMBO Press have begun to publish referee reports. Publishers including Copernicus, BMJ and BMC (the latter is owned by Springer Nature) have been doing so for even longer (see ‘Revealing peer review’). Last year, the organizers of Peer Review Week embraced the topic in a broader discussion of transparency.

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Nature560, 545-547 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06032-w

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 13 September 2018: An earlier version of the timeline in this Comment stated that peer review began to be published atThe EMBO Journal in 2010.

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