Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature's research papers

I want to stick my neck out to say that this has the potential of being very bad for science.

Imagine saying "no" to a researcher with a big social media profile. Imagine 4chan coming at you with style-detection and deanonymization tools simply because their favorite racist or antivaxer got their nonsense rejected and sent their followers after you. And this is not just me feeling this way - quoting myself from a previous comment, and according to the ACL's 2019 survey [1], "female respondents were less likely to support public review than male respondents" and "support for public review inversely correlated with reviewing experience".

A measure that women ~~and inexperienced researchers~~[2] do not support is a measure that favors only those who are already part of the club.

[1] Original here (currently offline): http://acl2019pcblog.fileli.unipi.it/wp-content/uploads/2019..., summary here: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/images/f/f5/ACL_Reviewing_S...

[2] This part has been correctly pointed out as being wrong.

This is amazing. The trust of peer review as a stamp of quality among academics is dwindling, and distrust of science among the population is growing (within the increasing politicisation of some areas of research). Transparent peer review raises the bar for both academics and enhances the potential trust in the process.

This is desperately needed as AI could further deteriorate the quality of science if the publishing process is not made more strict. This represents a significant step forward in rigorous science. I hope other publications follow suit.

This only addresses a small part of the problem with peer-review. The real problem is that peer reviewers can’t possibly replicate the study, and so are forced to look for inconsistencies in the papers. If the paper doesn’t fit what is expected, it will often be rejected. This can also lead to self-reinforcing views that ignore contrarian data. Also, the data can be made up, and if it makes sense to the reviewers, it is generally not questioned

A good step forward. Reading the referee reports and rebuttals from papers that previously opted in to transparent reviewing was incredibly useful to my own paper publishing process. In many ways Nature is ahead of Science on this.

I hope that making things transparent will help reduce the situation where big labs have an easier time getting their work into high impact journals through relationships with the editor.

> You have full access to this article via your institution.

I would suggest to Nature that this phrase hints at much larger a problem than showing authors arguing with Reviewer 2.

I only got as far as undergraduate research assistant in the academia racket, so maybe I'm not "with it" in the way serious researchers are, but is this to suggest that this wasn't being done, by default, on everything already?

We need more scientific societies. Modern peer review is super modern. Go back to the origins of science and it was all about a real community—setting high standards and having just a few people decide what to publish. It wasn’t trying to be “objective” — it was just high standards, determined invisibly by the members of the society. “Should we publish this?” asked the society.

Alas, scale ruins everything. Nevertheless, I strongly believe “science is friendship”

[dead]