Peering into peer-review at GigaScience

One of the big scientific trends of the past year has been the high profile that open-access and more open methods of performing science has received. With the Elsevier boycott, the Finch report in the UK, and the launch of a number of innovative new schemes in publishing open-access research and data (including Figshare, F1000 Research, eLife, PeerJ and of course GigaScience), 2012 has been talked of as the year of an “academic spring” that has started to shake up the centuries old, stuffy and closed system of scientific discourse [1].On top of changes to the way scientists and readers are demanding they can access and mine the literature and data, and with the new incentives and mechanisms to release and publish data, the process and deficiencies of peer-review has also come under the spotlight. Developing open source software is collaborative and interactive and so, if much of the scientific community are comfortable and find it constructive working in this manner, there is no reason why peer-review should not follow a similar process [2]. Many newly launched journals have tried to become more transparent, using systems such as post-publication peer-review (e.g. Biology Direct and F1000 Research), pre-print servers, providing access to anonymized (e.g. EMBO journals) or partial parts of the peer-review history (e.g. eLife), or encouraging reviewers to opt-into open peer-review (PeerJ, and experimented with a little at PLOS One).At GigaScience, we have decided to take this process one step further and ask for open peer-review as default, and as our aims are to promote more open, reproducible and transparent-science, we feel it promotes accountability, fairness, and importantly gives credit to reviewers for their hard efforts. Our co-publisher BioMed Central is a pioneer in this area, and on top of the BMC Series medical journals having open peer-review since their launch in the year 2000, our stablemates and fellow data-focused journals, BioData Mining and Biology