Australasian startups: part of a movement towards making peer review open and free |

Peer review is not open. Passing peer review asserts to scientists and the public alike that the methodology was sound; that the conclusions are correct; that the experimental protocols work ; that policy should be written; that medical interventions should, or should not be made. When some of these claims are later retracted, both scientific and public trust in peer review and the scientific method is eroded. Imagine then, if the entire peer review literature were open, as it already is in a handful of journals including BMJ Open, Gigascience and PeerJ. Journalists, scientists, policy-makers, doctors and patients could assess how rigorously the peer-review process was applied and how well the authors were able to address the issues raised. Rather than seeing the scientific literature as uniformly correct, we could begin to accept that every manuscript has limitations as well as strengths.