Transparent peer review: yea or nay?

Every scientist knows that getting a paper published can sometimes be as difficult as performing the experiments in the first place. Can a transparent peer-review process make this procedure less painful? After completing the experiments and writing the manuscript, all you need to do is submit the paper, get peer reviewed, and publish, right? Unfortunately, it’s rarely that simple. “Many scientists will have experienced peer review that’s too slow, or too critical, and where the different reviewers want to see every possible question answered with more experiments during revisions,” stated Andy Collings, executive editor of eLife, a journal that aims to...