All peer review files will be made public for Nature articles, the journal says.
The scientific journal Nature is going to publish files showing the peer review process for all manuscripts moving forward, editors said on June 16.
“The exchanges between the referees and the authors will be accessible to all. Our aim in doing so is to open up what many see as the ‘black box’ of science, shedding light on how a research paper is made,” the editors said in an editorial. “This serves to increase transparency and (we hope) to build trust in the scientific process.”
First published in 1869, Nature is one of the world’s oldest journals. It started requiring peer review for all research articles in 1973.
Peer review refers to experts reviewing submissions and offering feedback to authors. The process typically involves multiple rounds of comments and tweaks and can last for months, or even more than a year.
Many journals only publish peer-reviewed work, but do not make public the discussions between experts and authors.
In a 2017 survey of Nature reviewers, a slight majority said that the peer review process could be more transparent. Sixty-three percent also said that publishers should try alternative peer review methods.
Nature in 2020 began offering the option for authors to have peer review files published alongside their papers in what was termed a trial. Authors could also choose to have the files kept private.
Nature editors said in the new editorial that seeing the files can be helpful for researchers who are just starting their careers.
“Making peer-reviewer reports public also enriches science communication: it’s a chance to add to the ‘story’ of how a result is arrived at, or a conclusion supported, even if it includes only the perspectives of authors and reviewers,” they wrote.
The editors added later that keeping such files confidential “has meant that the wider research community, and the world, has had few opportunities to learn what is discussed.”
The names of the reviewers will remain anonymous, unless the reviewers choose to have their names publicized, according to Nature.
The move comes after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in May that “we’re going to publish the peer review for the first time” and that the government would likely launch government-run journals, while criticizing existing journals for what he described as lackluster verification and replication efforts.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said in June that the NIH was going to start a journal that would publish results of replication experiments and make the papers easily searchable.
