Traditionally, scientific publishing happened behind the scenes, with only the final product of a new scientific article shared with the research community at the end of the process. The efforts of peer review, historically, remained invisible despite providing imperative contributions to scientific publishing. In the past 10–15 years, though, more journals have challenged this norm by publishing peer review reports alongside the final research article.
Magdalena Skipper, the editor-in-chief of Nature and the chief editorial advisor of Nature Portfolio, said that Nature Communications, the publisher’s open access journal, first introduced optional transparent peer review reports in 2016. “It seemed like such an obvious decision to make for an open access journal to increase transparency and accessibility of all the information that surrounds paper,” she said. Skipper subsequently made this a compulsory process in 2022.
She introduced this same idea to Nature in 2020, but at the time, they allowed authors to decide whether or not they wanted to publish their reports. After five years of positive reception, Skipper and her team decided to make the switch to automatically publish all peer review reports for articles submitted after June 16, 2025.
Many publishers and researchers alike see these reports as a welcome improvement in the publishing process. Some, in fact, hope to see more transparency in the publishing and review pipeline, whereas others are less certain of the widespread value such openness has to offer.
Transparent Peer Review is a Net Positive
The overall response to Nature’s announcement online was positive, with researchers commenting about this being a good step for publishing. Dimitri Drekonja, an infectious disease clinical researcher at the University of Minnesota, said, “[I’m] glad more places are doing this. I find it helpful.”
Christian Gaebler, a physician scientist at Charite University Hospital, thought the decision was an overall good change, seeing it as an interesting opportunity for readers to see the process behind a paper’s publication. However, while he said he will probably read the reports for papers relevant to his research area, Gaebler added that he doesn’t expect to look at most papers’ reviews. In relation to this, he asked, “Who will be the target audience? I’m curious about that myself.”
Skipper believes that making these reviews available has multiple benefits for a variety of groups. Research trainees and junior faculty often use the reports to learn about the process of peer review and how to craft productive critiques. “It's actually an incredible insight into how constructive peer review should be done,” she said.
She said that these reports could help establish trust in the scientific process by demonstrating the rigorous review that research undergoes. She added that the reports can also be used as a record if a paper’s claims come under scrutiny to confirm that the study was reviewed to the best of the reviewers’ abilities.
However, Gaebler remarked that making the reports available may ultimately not improve trust in the scientific process because so many require topical knowledge to understand their value. While policymakers and the general public may be able to see that the exchange is happening, they may not appreciate how peer review is improving the research with just the reports alone. Gaebler said that, if these groups are a target audience of these published reviews, then Nature and other journals that publish them should consider summarizing their content for non-experts.
Skipper said that while she and her team aren’t currently considering adding these types of summaries, they are looking forward to studying how the reports are being used and refining their approach based on this information in a few years. Another benefit that Skipper said she hopes comes out of transparent peer review is recognizing the time commitment of researchers who agree to review manuscripts.
“I'm hoping that by publishing those referee reports, we and other journals who also publish them will be in some way contributing to sort of socializing the idea that this is an important contribution which can be seen, can be measured, can be cited,” Skipper said, adding that peer review reports, then, could be more easily included in researchers’ evaluations and job application materials.
To Sign or Not to Sign: Is Anonymity Good in Transparent Peer Review?
However, more so than the publication of these reports, the subject of reviewer anonymity divides researchers. Monica Zoppè, a cellular and structural biologist at the Institute of Biophysics of the Italian National Research Council, said that reviewers should identify themselves so that competitors in a field could not hide overly critical reviews behind anonymity. “If people knew that their review would be published, they would be more careful in the review process, especially if it's not anonymous.”
Drekonja agreed. “If you're going to do the work of a reviewer, I think you should put your name to it and be ready to say that this is what you think and why you think it.” He added that good peer review pushes an author to support their work and conclusions. While he thinks most reviewers put in this effort to improve manuscripts, there are outliers. “I have been struck by the fact that there are a sizable [number] of reviewers who put in a pretty bare minimum of work to it,” he said, adding that transparent peer review with the comments signed could deter this behavior.
One concern that some researchers share about publishing peer review reports is that doing so will reduce the number of people willing to agree to review papers. Zoppè disagreed. “I really can't see why people should be less willing to review a paper if the review would be published. I mean, if a review is made with good scientific ethics, then it should not be anything that one should not want to be published, whether it is anonymous or not.”
On the contrary, Gaebler explained that, while his personal decision to review a paper is based on if he has time to take on the responsibility, he could see more researchers declining to review because of the extra time to craft responses. “Reviewing is part of the job description, but it's still something that is always kind of on top of everything. And I do agree that by then, knowing how that this will all be transparent, I can see that this adds to the workload,” he said.
Skipper said that her team did not see an indication of change in the frequency of reviewers accepting to participate when they introduced transparent peer review. Timothy Behrens, a neuroscientist at Oxford University and the University College London and the editor-in-chief of eLife, said that their journal has always published these reports and has seen good acceptance rates from reviewers. He added that they didn’t see a drop in these numbers until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that to his knowledge, the whole industry experienced a similar decrease in reviewer acceptance. Thus, publishing these reports may not be the biggest deciding factor for researchers to choose to review.
However, Behrens explained that he and his team studied the demographics of researchers who chose to sign their reviews when the journal made the option available. They saw that white, male researchers represented most signed reviews. He said that, based on the statistics they saw, he and his team felt that forcing reviewers to identify themselves could skew their reviewer pool to this demographic by deterring other researchers from participating.
Skipper agreed that the decision to sign a review or not should be the reviewer’s choice. “Part of the reason why we have never considered mandating that sort of unblinded peer review is because of these nuances that many individuals may not feel at liberty to be appropriately critical of the work that they're evaluating,” she said.
Because of their findings, eLife chose to keep all published reviews on their website anonymous. However, since eLife updated their publishing model, all articles are also available on bioRxiv, and reviewers can sign their reviews there.
Another concern surrounding transparent peer review is how it influences the content of the comments. “There’s also some worry that maybe this leads to reviews being overly positive,” said Gaebler.
Behrens said that eLife studied the types of comments on reviews that reviewers signed versus those where the commenter remained anonymous. “We found out that signed reviews are almost always more positive than unsigned reviews,” he said.
Skipper said that after initially introducing transparent peer review at Nature Communications and then an optional version at Nature, her team did not see any noticeable difference in the quality of the reviews that they received. However, she added that she would be interested in exploring how reviews may be written differently, such as in a more formal tone, as more of these get published.
Transparent Publishing Remains an Ongoing Experiment
In a further step in publishing transparency, eLife changed its entire publishing model in 2023. As opposed to peer review happening prior to an article being published, eLife publishes almost all articles submitted to the journal with an editorial review, and then peer review occurs transparently on the site.
Behrens said that part of the journal’s decision to do this was to put authors more in control of their article’s publication. As opposed to waiting for months for reviews, revising the work, and then still being rejected, researchers can submit their findings and respond to comments to improve the work in a manner separated from the publication decision.
While proponents of traditional publishing with pre-publication peer review argue the process stops flawed work from being published, Behrens pointed out that this doesn’t always happen. With a plethora of journals and a finite pool of reviewers, there is little stopping persistent authors from submitting unrevised manuscripts to new journals until a set of reviewers overlook the flaw.
Instead, Behrens said that by publishing the paper and addressing the flaws publicly, “They won’t be able to publish the flawed paper elsewhere, because the discourse is public.” He said that this process also alleviates peer reviewers of the pressure to decide whether something is publish-worthy, allowing them to focus on simply critiquing the science. This, Behrens said, more accurately reflects the scientific process.
However, Gaebler said that this may become overwhelming in an ecosystem already full of information. “There is a reason also why we have journals to kind of streamline some of the findings and that we have this process,” he said. “It's very getting a little bit difficult to then find what is like the end result of these things and what is really relevant.”
Science is an iterative process. So far, researchers find that publishing peer review comments is an overall net positive. However, the details of whether these reports should be signed or remain anonymous, how these change critiques overall, and what other material should be included is an ongoing experiment that will take time to produce results.
