Nature Neuroscience is joining an alliance of journals that share manuscript peer-reviews, according to the journal's April editorial.

The Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium (NPRC) is a group of neuroscience journals that have agreed to accept reviews from other members of the Consortium in an effort to accelerate and improve the efficiency of the publication process. Under the scheme, authors whose papers are rejected by one journal can choose to have the reviews forwarded to a second participating journal.

The system is optional, but may be in the author's best interests, especially if the reviews are positive but suggest that the paper would be more suitable for a different journal. Referees for member journals, who will always remain anonymous to authors, must agree to allow their reviews to be shared between journals, but can decide whether or not to reveal their identities to editors once a review has been passed along.

Nature Neuroscience — the top-ranking neurosciences primary research journal with an impact factor (IF) of 14.805, according to the 2006 ISI Journal Citation Reports — is the 28th journal to sign up to the NPRC, joining others including Journal of Neuroscience (IF = 7.453) and NeuroImage (IF = 5.559). The Consortium, which is supported by the Society for Neuroscience, started at the beginning of the year and will run for a one-year trial period that ends December 31, 2008.