Announcement: eLife signs open letter on publication of peer review reports

On February 7–9, 2018, editors, publishers, funders and researchers gathered at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Headquarters in Chevy Chase, MD, to discuss innovations in peer review. A clear majority of participants at the meeting agreed that publishing peer review reports (i.e., the contents of peer review, whether anonymised or not), would benefit the research community by increasing transparency of the assessment process. These benefits include 1) increased reviewer and editorial accountability, 2) training opportunities to educate students about the peer-review process, 3) enhancing readers’ understanding of the article in the context of the field, and 4) a pathway to providing credit for peer review. Evidence suggests that publishing peer review reports does not change the quality of reviewers’ assessment.

With the above benefits in mind, the open letter on the publication of peer review reports has been created to highlight the signatories’ commitment to publishing peer review reports and author responses alongside the final, published articles. You can read a Nature commentary on the open letter here. eLife, which already publishes reports as part of its consultative and transparent peer review process, is pleased to be an original signatory.

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

We, the undersigned journals, recognise the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable or undertake to enable the publication of all of the content of peer review, but not necessarily the names of reviewers (this is also called open peer review reports) and author responses alongside final, published articles.

We recognise that implementations of published peer review reports may vary – with some journals mandating it for all published articles, while others may offer authors an opt-in or opt-out option – providing an opportunity to compare experiments across different journal policies and fields. In the pursuit of best practices, we commit to sharing information about community responses to varied implementations.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognise the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Signatories

For any publishers wishing to join the list, please email jessica.polka@asapbio.org.

We welcome comments/questions from researchers as well as other journals. Please annotate publicly on the article or contact us at hello [at] elifesciences [dot] org.

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