Open peer review a bust for NATURE

Back in the summer, we reported that Nature, perhaps the most prestigious scientific journal on the planet, was experimenting with open peer review (OPR). Instead of simply assigning manuscripts to a set of anonymous reviewers, Nature offered the authors the opportunity to also have their work posted on a publicly accessible site that provided a mechanism for making comments on the text. The editors would then combine the peer reviewers' recommendations with the public comments when making decisions regarding whether to publish the work or to require additional revisions. Nature ran a trial of this system (details are available as a FAQ) from the beginning of June until the end of September, and followed up on it with surveys of authors and editors. Their resulting analysis makes it clear that, at least as structured, OPR went nowhere. Out of nearly 1,400 manuscripts chosen for review during that period, only five percent of the authors agreed to have theirs subjected to OPR. Those 71 manuscripts elicited a grand total of 92 comments; nearly half received no comments at all, and over half of the comments were directed at eight individual papers. Read the rest of the article here.