16 June 2025
(Nature editorial: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01880-9)
- EDITORIAL 16 June 2025
From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science.
Since 2020, Nature has offered authors the opportunity to have their peer-review file published alongside their paper. Our colleagues at Nature Communications have been doing so since 2016. Until now, Nature authors could opt in to this process of transparent peer review. From 16 June, however, new submissions of manuscripts that are published as research articles in Nature will automatically include a link to the reviewers’ reports and author responses.
It means that, over time, more Nature papers will include a peer-review file. The identity of the reviewers will remain anonymous, unless they choose otherwise — as happens now. But the exchanges between the referees and the authors will be accessible to all. Our aim in doing so is to open up what many see as the ‘black box’ of science, shedding light on how a research paper is made. This serves to increase transparency and (we hope) to build trust in the scientific process.
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We hope that publishing the peer-reviewer reports of all newly submitted Nature papers shows, in a small way, that this doesn’t need to remain the case. Nature started mandating peer review for all published research articles only in 1973 (M. Baldwin Notes Rec. 69, 337–352; 2015). But the convention in most fields is still to keep the content of these peer-review exchanges confidential. That has meant that the wider research community, and the world, has had few opportunities to learn what is discussed.
Peer review improves papers. The exchanges between authors and referees should be seen as a crucial part of the scientific record, just as they are a key part of doing and disseminating research.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01880-9