Copernicus signed open letter on the publication of peer review reports
To further promote the idea of a more transparent peer review, we were happy to sign the open letter on the publication of peer review reports initiated by ASAPbio.
What we have been practising since 2001 – bringing more transparency into scientific quality assurance by opening up the content of referee reports – should become mainstream. While different publishers experiment with various forms of open peer review, the percentage of journals doing so is relatively low.
While other publishers often only show the outcome of the peer review process (i.e. the final article and the respective peer review reports), our model goes even further: in journals applying our unique Interactive Public Peer Review, the author's manuscript is posted as a preprint in an online forum, and in addition to the referees selected by the editor, interested readers are invited to comment as well. All of these comments (i.e. referee reports and reader comments) are openly accessible and citable through DOIs, but the referees may stay anonymous. If an article is ultimately accepted and published, all referee and editor reports as well as author responses and manuscript versions are published alongside the article.
For further information, please read the Nature Comment "Publish peer reviews" by Jessica Polka et al. and the open letter on the publication of peer review reports.