Can open peer review work for biologists?
The advent of immensely powerful means of communication in our information age offers unprecedented opportunities for experimentation with new approaches to scientific publishing. In an attempt to offer the scientific community an alternative to the current peer-review system, we recently launched a new journal, Biology Direct. In Biology Direct, everything happens in the open: the authors select their own reviewers from the editorial board, and the reviews are not only signed but also published, alongside authors’ responses, as an integral part of each article. The reviews can be critical or even outright negative. The only condition of publication is that three members of the Biology Direct editorial board become sufficiently interested in a submission to either review it themselves or to solicit a review from an outside expert. Conversely, a paper is rejected if and only if the author cannot get three reviews. Obviously, the authors can ‘self-reject’, that is, they can withdraw thei
