3 ms·

I wonder what is the impact of this change. From my limited experience peer reviews are treated as fairly private communications between the reviewers, editor

I wonder what is the impact of this change. From my limited experience peer reviews are treated as fairly private communications between the reviewers, editor and authors. We would often use it as an important clue on what to change even if we are going to another journal for publication. This makes the content of the reviews rather sensitive, especially in the cases where there is competition for publication on the same subject. There are also the cases where Reviewer X may ask authors to do a very specific analysis/improvement that may somewhat benefit their own future research. It's all par for the course. Another aspect of this that sometimes experienced professors have a fairly good sense on who's giving the review, even though they may be anonymous. Since this policy gives authors the choice of publishing reviews, I hope it does not degrade the quality of reviews and make people uncomfortable for writing "rude" feedback.

prepend 7y ago
I don’t publish or review too much, but I do a little. One of the recently frustrating events to me is that I got comments back from a reviewer that made an incorrect factual statement along the lines of “it’s against government policy to share x type of data.” And then discounted large parts of the conclusion as impossible or inappropriate. That was the only substantive comment from the reviewer. We responded back to the editors refuting it and showing the relevant policies and regulations showing how data sharing for x was allowed. The next message back was from editors declining. So further feedback. I would have really liked to learn more about why the reviewer thought what they thought and why what seemed like clear evidence to my co-authors and I wasn’t to the peer reviewer and editors. I’ll never know and I don’t spend many cycles contemplating it, but this new trial in Nature would help me understand the criticism better.

prepend 7y ago

I don’t publish or review too much, but I do a little. One of the recently frustrating events to me is that I got comments back from a reviewer that made an incorrect factual statement along the lines of “it’s against government policy to share x type of data.” And then discounted large parts of the conclusion as impossible or inappropriate. That was the only substantive comment from the reviewer. We responded back to the editors refuting it and showing the relevant policies and regulations showing how data sharing for x was allowed. The next message back was from editors declining. So further feedback. I would have really liked to learn more about why the reviewer thought what they thought and why what seemed like clear evidence to my co-authors and I wasn’t to the peer reviewer and editors. I’ll never know and I don’t spend many cycles contemplating it, but this new trial in Nature would help me understand the criticism better.