Wednesday, February 24, 2016

We almost got reviewers' comments published

Our goal from the beginning has been to immediately publish all the scientific content related to the project. One relevant part of the content are discussions between reviewers and authors during the peer review process. We have now published two peer reviewed articles: NMRlipids I and NMRlipids V. In both cases we have asked from the editor if we can publish also the reviewer's comments since everything else is public. As expected, in the NMRlipids I case the Journal of Physical Chemistry staff replied that this is not possible. However, editorial and publishing teams of BBA Membranes'  were positive about publishing the referee's comments in the case of NMRlipids V publication. Both referees were also sympathetic to the idea. However, one of them declined stating permission to make comments available should be asked a priori, at the same time referees are invited to review a paper. This is an important learning point from this experience.

3 comments:

  1. Come to think of it, why would you need permissions? The comments are anonymous, non-copyrighted. Publishing comments might be a good way to improve quality of refereeing...

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    1. When people write referee comments, they usually assume that those will not be publicly available. Despite of the legal details, I think that it is fair to ask the permission in this case. In the case of NMRlipids II manuscript, I attached a letter for referee's in the submission where the permission is asked: https://github.com/NMRLipids/lipid_ionINTERACTION/blob/master/Manuscript/LetterToReferees.pdf

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  2. As mentioned above, I asked a permission to publish referees' comments related to NMRlipids II from Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics journal staff and reviewers. The permission was not granted because this is the policy of the journal.

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