Transparent peer review-An appreciation of the reviewers' contribution to a published article

摘要

In January 2009, the EMBO Journal started the experiment of a transparent peer review process (R鴕th, 2009), i.e., publishing a supplementary Review Process File (RPF) accompanying the online version of articles. The RPF contains the timeline and all relevant communication from the review process, including the anonymous referees?comments, decision letters and the responses from authors. This initiative has been highly welcomed ?among others ?by stem cell researchers, who published an 慜pen letter to Senior Editors of peer-review journals publishing in the field of stem cell biology?on July 10, 2009, via the EuroStemCell (European Consortium for Stem Cell Research) web pages (http://www.eurostemcell.org/commentanalysis/peerreview) in which they encouraged other journals to follow suit.