Nature moves toward full transparency in peer review
by Piyush Mathur
In a landmark shift for its policy, Nature—the flagship journal of the Nature Portfolio—has announced in a June 16 editorial that all its research submissions from that point on will be subject to automatic transparent peer review. This means that the journal’s published papers will now be accompanied by anonymised reviewer reports and author responses—a significant departure from the traditional confidentiality of peer-review exchanges.
Since 2020, authors had the option to opt in to open peer review; the new policy makes this transparency the default, aiming to lift the veil on the inner workings of the research publication process. The reviewers, however, will remain anonymous unless they choose to reveal themselves.
The change reflects a growing recognition of the value of peer review—not only in strengthening rigour in research but also as an educational tool, especially for early-career researchers. There will now be an extra layer to the processual record, giving upcoming researchers insight into how findings are challenged, defended, and improved before publication.
The editorial also shares the journal’s hope that the shift toward transparent reviews would build public’s trust in the process of research.
It should be noted, though, that academia itself had been becoming increasingly disenchanted with the peer review process. As recently as January this year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a critical article examining the problems with peer review, and exploring ways for improving it.
Nature’s move comes amid a broader conversation about transparency in research in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, mentioned in the editorial.
The fast developing pandemic laid bare the infirmities and inconsistencies of medical research and practice—which were typically explained away by mainstream medical researchers as complexities of ‘science’, with something so all-encompassing as ‘social media’ blamed by them as the culprit behind their miscommunication.
During that period, the real-time evolution of knowledge around SARS-CoV-2 tended to show up as quickly changing and frequently contradictory claims about various aspects of Covid-19; the whole situation led to shifting restrictions on the lives of the multitudes.
The editorial notes that Nature Communications—one of the journals of the Nature Portfolio—was the first to adopt, in 2016, the opt-in open peer-review process. The editorial also points out that ‘peer review’ (by which it likely means external peer review) itself became mandatory for ‘all published research articles only in 1973’ at Nature.
The editorial can be accessed via this link, or downloaded as a pdf here.