Nature Journal Mandates Public Peer Review For All New Research Papers (nature.com) 10
Nature will automatically publish peer review reports and author responses alongside all newly submitted research papers starting this week. The flagship scientific journal previously offered transparent peer review as an optional service since 2020, while Nature Communications has required it since 2016.
All exchanges between authors and anonymous reviewers will become publicly accessible (reviewer identities remain confidential unless they choose disclosure). Nature aims to open what it calls the "black box" of science by revealing the months-long conversations that shape research papers before publication.
All exchanges between authors and anonymous reviewers will become publicly accessible (reviewer identities remain confidential unless they choose disclosure). Nature aims to open what it calls the "black box" of science by revealing the months-long conversations that shape research papers before publication.
Peer review doesn't mean much (Score:3, Insightful)
Peer review doesn't mean the paper is beyond debate. It means people with a similar subject matter expertise makes sure the paper did their math correctly, didn't make large leaps in logic, maybe some grammar checking, and a few other checks to make sure there isn't anything leaping out as being a breach of scientific rigor.
What the peer reviewers will not likely be able to do is any repeat of the experimentation and observations to check that the results were good. To recreate the study would take too much time and resources for a review, that's something to be done to create another paper to prove the first paper right or wrong. Those doing the review will have to take a lot of things on faith as they were not likely present during the experiments to prove they were honest in the paper. If they were present at the time then they'd likely be considered too close to those writing the paper to be considered an impartial reviewer.
For a lot of subjects it can be difficult to find someone with enough expertise in the specific field of the paper to know if the paper is worthless, there's just not a lot of people trained in it so finding an impartial reviewer is a problem. That means finding people with not enough knowledge in the matter to give it a meaningful up or down vote. I mean they can still check for obvious math errors and so forth but without enough background on the matter they can't tell if what they are reading is complete nonsense or not.
If Nature is offering the peer reviewers for papers that are submitted then that gets into a problem of the reviewers being pressured to give the paper a pass or not be given papers to review before publication.
This sounds nice but I'm doubtful this will really help all that much in improving the quality of papers that reach publication. Maybe it is a start to seeing better science.
Re:Peer review doesn't mean much (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been offered a check box for over 2 years about my willingness to have my comments follow the paper should the authors decide to switch to a different journal at the publisher with different policies around publishing reviewer comments (our journals don't publish comments currently), and I have always said "Yes".
First off, even if my comments go with a paper, my name does not. So it's not like I need to worry about blow back from authors or their corporate sponsors.
Second off, if I've done my job right, there should not be anything in there I would be embarrassed to have linked back to me, even if my name were some how put to my comments. Anyone treating anonymous manuscript comments like 4chan should not be reviewing manuscripts in the first place.
I honestly don't see any reason for the conflict of interest you propose should Nature supply the reviewers. It is not like Nature has on-staff reviewers. They, like every other journal of which I am aware (and is not a pay to play journal), uses volunteer reviewers from amongst their subscriber base, which means they are ALREADY supplying the reviewers.
The objective for things like this, IMO, is to improve the transparency of the peer review process. If I find issues with a published paper, and see that the 2 reviewers did only a half assed "all looks good to me" type of review, then I know why the final product isn't great. However, if I find an issue, and can see that the reviewers worked with the authors to address the topic, I have more confidence in the quality of the paper.
Re: (Score:2)
Peer review doesn't mean the paper is beyond debate.
If I'm reading TFA correctly, Nature isn't changing which papers are peer reviewed or the review process. What they're doing is offering to publish all the communication between the author and reviewers. That might let others see whether they think the review was fair and unbiased. We might be able to see whether an author significantly changed the paper solely to appease a reviewer.
Of course, what this doesn't address is a paper getting quashed because reviewers refused to approve it, possibly because the
Re: (Score:2)
More papers should be quashed.
Most papers aren't worth the time it takes to read them today. This is not a conspiracy claim, it's merely the fact that quality and significance is very hard to achieve, so tends to happen rarely. But journals want regularity and quantity. These two things are incompatible, and result in filling issues with less than stellar material.
Qualified people are busy. Give them fewer papers to review and they will do a better job. Give them more papers and they will be less thoroug
Deanonymisation (Score:3)
I doubt that. It was already possible to play "guess the reviewer" by looking at their stylistic choices, suggested references, etc. and software has made it much easier. The interesting question is to what extent this will dissuade people from (a) submitting to; (b) reviewing for the journal.
Re: (Score:2)
One of the great features of public reviews is that the reviewers need to think twice before they demand that you reference half a dozen of their own papers.
Re: (Score:2)
It has been a while, but I used to do reviews for a couple of journals, all in the Applied Mathematics field. I never worried about anonymity. It'd be trivial for them to figure out that it's me (with enough information). There really weren't that many papers being published and there was a smaller set of people willing to review the papers.
Re: (Score:2)
They publish the reviews publicly, the general public does not provide the reviews.