I think this is good, and may also <i>improve</i> reviews. I doubt that Nature has an issue with substandard reviews, but I have definitely seen it in some of the computer science conferences I submit to and have served on [1]. If reviewers know that their review may be published, I think they may turn in more substantial reviews.<p>[1] In computer science, conference publications are peer-reviewed and highly competitive. We also have journals, but most novel work appears in conferences. The more theory oriented parts of computer science will tend to publish in journals more, but they still publish in conferences, too.
As mentioned in the article, Nat Comm has been doing this for a few years now. I have found it immensely interesting and helpful for my own research to have access to the peer review files (usually in the Supplementary Information [1]). It is a great way to show younger students the process and formatting behind peer review and also have examples of what constitutes a positive review process. As an author, it does feel like a positive as well to have the peer review file out, so that readers who are interested can see how the work developed, and what points or weaknesses the reviewers focused on.<p>[1] randomly chosen from homepage - <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14530-7#Sec11" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14530-7#Sec11</a>
We all know that publishers add little value to science, and nature here looks to be striving to add even less than usual. If the peer reviews are not of good enough quality, your editors should be handling that! Don’t rely on the readers to review the peer review. Dumping the peer reviews online is just a way to avoid the responsibility of quality control.
I wonder what is the impact of this change.<p>From my limited experience peer reviews are treated as fairly private communications between the reviewers, editor and authors. We would often use it as an important clue on what to change even if we are going to another journal for publication. This makes the content of the reviews rather sensitive, especially in the cases where there is competition for publication on the same subject.<p>There are also the cases where Reviewer X may ask authors to do a very specific analysis/improvement that may somewhat benefit their own future research. It's all par for the course.<p>Another aspect of this that sometimes experienced professors have a fairly good sense on who's giving the review, even though they may be anonymous.<p>Since this policy gives authors the choice of publishing reviews, I hope it does not degrade the quality of reviews and make people uncomfortable for writing "rude" feedback.
Some comments seem to miss the point that reviews will be published without naming the reviewers (unless they want to), and then only for accepted papers. So for the reviewer this should not change things much.<p>Also, NeurIPS conference publishes reviews for a long time now. But I haven't heard of anyone talking about a review of a paper. And if you do look at these reviews, really many of them are of really dismal quality. Maybe things will be different for Nature, idk.
Start by publishing the name of the editor alongside each paper. Some editors barely look at papers or even the reviews. They basically just look at whether the reviewers ticked the 'accept' or 'reject' box, and base the decision on that (after possibly getting another review to break a tie). This can go undetected for quite a while, unless the journal has a chief editor who keeps on top of things.
Oh, man. I've been involved in peer-review discussions where the review correspondence is far more voluminous than the article itself. I wonder how the journals will handle the page-count.
I like the idea in principle, but it raises the bar for the quality of the review that is going to be published, and might thus discourage people from accepting to review papers. It is hard already as it is to find peer reviewers!<p>We're getting to the point where there really has to be a financial incentive to do a peer review (Springer gives you a free book, which is a start). If that were the case, I wouldn't mind doing it occasionally when I retire.
> Research communities are unanimous in acknowledging the value of peer review<p>> 82% agreed that standard peer review ensures high-quality work gets published<p>How common is the view that peer review only serves as an institutional gatekeeping mechanism and harms innovation? (as I've heard Eric Weinstein charge on his podcast, <i>The Portal</i>)
Elife did this experiment long ago (one of their many innovations)<p><a href="https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/e9091cea/peer-review-new-initiatives-to-enhance-the-value-of-elife-s-process" rel="nofollow">https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/e9091cea/peer-review-...</a>
Why not have a site where people can openly comment and discuss individual research papers? This would make it more accessible to the public and increase the transparency in the research.
You can have a mod that keeps the conversation on topic and in any case it's better than nothing.
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) have been doing this for a while - publishing both the peer-review comments and author responses.
I have published a paper in the BMJ and thought the process worked well and tempered the responses on both sides.
It saddens me somewhat that in the push between open peer review and double-blind peer review, open peer review seems to be winning.<p>I've had a couple bad experiences with it, and <i>vastly</i> prefer double-blind.
All research indeed will benefit from such an approach. Think of transitioning from the lack of version control systems to their appearance. But it is not enough for better scientific publishing. There was quite an interesting discussion[1] about creating something in between Overleaf[2], ArXiv[3], Git, and Wikipedia, moreover with the ability to do a peer-to-peer review, discussion, and social networking. See also the last[4] article in that series. There are a few implementations, albeit not covering all features, like Authorea[5] and MIT's PubPub[6] (it is the open source[7]). See also GitXiv[8]. See also the Publishing Reform[9] project. Moreover, there is quite an interesting initiative from DARPA, to create the scientific social network of a kind - Polyplexus[10].<p>[1] <a href="http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxiv/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.overleaf.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.overleaf.com/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://arxiv.org/" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/</a><p>[4] <a href="http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/05/20/gitwikxiv-follow-up-a-path-to-forkable-papers/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/05/20/gitwikxiv-follow-up-a-...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://authorea.com/" rel="nofollow">https://authorea.com/</a><p>[6] <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pubpub.org/</a><p>[7] <a href="https://github.com/pubpub" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pubpub</a><p>[8] <a href="https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer-science-e5fea734cd45" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer...</a><p>[9] <a href="https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion</a><p>[10] <a href="https://polyplexus.com/" rel="nofollow">https://polyplexus.com/</a>
Note that eLife will also be publishing peer review reports, even independent of "accepting" or "rejecting" a paper (and might even abandon that concept altogether): <a href="https://twitter.com/mbeisen/status/1155286615721254912" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/mbeisen/status/1155286615721254912</a><p>(Tweets by eLife's Editor-in-Chief.)
They've also announced two days ago that they will have a new journal dedicated to aging. This is big news for those of us who want longer, healthier lives.
The peer review process has reached a point where it's more harmful than helpful.<p>What I want has following properties:<p>* Version control, I can contribute to other people's papers<p>* I can link to a sentence in another paper at some point in time so that when I read another paper, I can go to the location immediately<p>* Open, like arxiv (anyone can publish anything), however arxiv discourages uploading personal or class projects, which is a terrible idea, the best part about GitHub is finding someone's abandoned project that does something<p>* Full-text search<p>I think that most academic publishing startups approach the problem by indexing already published papers. I think that starting clean slate is achievable.
The current scientific publishing method is pretty much dead. It is absurd, biased, produces terrible results. Promotes inept research, unimaginable waste.<p>Yet dead as it might be most decision-makers and other leeches of science will pretend that it is just fine and alive. They will continue to do so for many years. Decades perhaps.<p>It is like watching Weekend at Bernie's.<p>This attempt of Nature is little more than holding up Bernie, waving his hand. Look, it is moving! It is not dead.