Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

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.
  1. Jessica K. Polka

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

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  2. Robert Kiley

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

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  3. Boyana Konforti

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

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  4. Bodo Stern

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

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  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.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

Illustration by David Parkins

Long shrouded in secrecy, the contents of peer review are coming into the open. In the past decade, outlets such as eLife, 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.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 560, 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 at The EMBO Journal in 2010.

References

  1. Ross-Hellauer, T. F1000Research 6, 588 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Ross-Hellauer, T., Deppe, A. & Schmidt, B. PLoS ONE 12, e0189311 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Publishing Research Consortium. PRC Peer Review Survey 2015 (Mark Ware Consulting, 2016).

    Google Scholar 

  4. Pulverer, B. EMBO J. 29, 3891–3892 (2010).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Nature Commun. 7, 13626 (2016).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. van Rooyen, S., Delamothe, T. & Evans, S. J. W. Br. Med. J. 341, c5729 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Tregenza, T. Trends Ecol. Evol. 17, 349–350 (2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Shen, Y. A., Webster, J. M., Shoda, Y. & Fine, I. Preprint at bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/275362 (2018).

Download references

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links