Optionally transparent peer review: a major step forward, but which direction? | For Better Science

" ... I was dumbstruck. A journal of the notoriously elitist, secretive NPG, is opening its peer review, after going open access (OA) just one year before? Will Nature Communications be the avant-garde of open science at NPG, transforming the entire institution from the inside? Should all these OA and transparency advocating scientists, who turned their backs on established publishers in disappointment, return and start again submitting their research with the new, open NPG? ... Hold your horses. The editorial announcement went on with the sub-headline: 'Authors of papers submitted from January 2016 will be given the option to publish the peer review history of their paper'. This means, it is up to the authors to decide whether they want the world to see how their paper got accepted atNature Communications. To me it looked as nothing but a pretence of openness, exactly because where the peer review history is expected to be most informative it might be unavailable ..."