At the ASAPBio/HHMI meeting on peer review in February, the topic of “open peer review” came up several times, and it’s been aired recently on social media as well. We’ve been mulling this subject at Cell Press for a while now too, and we’d like add our thoughts to the overall discussion.

Openness in peer review can take various forms, and some people at the ASAPBio/HHMI meeting argued strongly that all peer review should take place entirely in the open, with names attached, at all times. However, given the various legitimate concerns about requiring everyone to review non-anonymously, most people took a more pragmatic view by focusing on the idea of journals posting the reviews they obtain for published papers, retaining reviewer anonymity, in a way that some journals already do. This is the type of approach that we have also been discussing.
.
We can see arguments in favor of publishing reviews but also a number of caveats and questions that give us pause. Some of these points have already come up in other coverage about the meeting, posts about the overall topic, and even pilots, but for completeness we are including them here as well, as they have formed part of our discussion. Some are also fairly clear, while others are more hypothetical, but we think they all merit consideration and airing, along with broader points related to defining the underlying goal.
.

Read the rest of this discussion piece