Exposing peer review | Research Information

"When Nature launched a trial of open peer review in June 2006, its editors and publishers felt peer review was ‘never perfect’ and the time was right to ‘explore a more participative approach’. But minimal uptake meant that come the end of the trial, Nature director, Timo Hannay, had decided scientists ‘weren’t ready’ for open peer review yet.

A little over a decade later, a very different picture is emerging. The likes of BioMed Central, PeerJ and F1000 Research welcome this flavour of peer review while myriad journals, including Nature Communications, are trialling processes. And, importantly for scholarly publishing, industry heavyweight Elsevier has just revealed plans to add optional open peer review to its fleet of 1,800 journals by 2020."