Nature is Opening Up the Peer Review Process

The venerable journal, Nature, is running a trial on opening up the peer review process. The process appears to be quite simple. First, go to the peer review page, scroll down and follow the trial peer review link. Once there, you can see the list of papers up for review, download, read and post comments to the website.

There is still the usual anonymous jury reviews for these papers. That part of the process is still vital. The open comments are an additional check on the content of these papers. By opening up the review process, there is much less chance of error or omissions in the publications. After all, it is not possible to always know who has the most pertinent background knowledge to review a particular paper, and sometimes, the jury reviews can have errors too.

This is a trial project, but I think it has some terrific implications. So, if you have any expertise in the papers currently for review, go and comment on them.