46% Authors supported Nature’s transparent peer review in 2021; more estimated this year
In early 2020, Nature announced1 an opportunity for authors to publish their peer-review exchanges with reviewers as an attempt to bring transparency to the peer review process, and nearly half of the authors who published in Nature last year opted for this option.
As part of the process, authors could choose to publish their papers along with anonymous peer review reports along with their responses to the reviewer comments, and reviewers were made aware of this. By default, the referee reports and the comments would be published anonymously, however, the reviewers also had the choice to reveal their identity.
The data from the first year indicates that 46% of the authors, which is 447 out of 974 articles published in Nature, willingly published their peer-review comments along with their manuscripts. Nature Communications witnessed 69% of their articles published along with peer review comments and reports, with 77% manuscripts belonging to earth sciences, followed by life sciences (73%), physics (64%), and chemistry (59%). It is estimated that the number of such publications will increase this year.
According to Nature, the reason behind the initiative was the lack of transparency in the peer review process, which can undermine the important role peer reviewers play. Transparency in peer-review comments and referee reports gives more opportunities to authors, especially early career researchers, to understand the fundamentals of the process deeply. Eventually, this would help them in their career as they would understand how peer reviewers and authors exchange views and work in collaboration.
Unveiling peer-review exchanges will allow the community to acknowledge the hard work peer reviewers put in to make research more robust, clear, and effective.
References:
1. Nature will publish peer review reports as a trial. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00309-9
2. Nature is trialling transparent peer review — the early results are encouraging. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00493-w
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