I sometimes find that the reviews I get on papers I submit to various high-impact journals are of surprisingly questionable quality. I typically get the impression that reviewers only read a paper in a cursory fashion, make rash assumptions, and hence make comments that are actually not relevant to the content. Or they might make unreasonable comparisons, along the lines of 'we know fusion works in principle, so why should one bother with research on photovoltaic cells '. I think this is a great waste of precious time and resources. I know that some journals use a public review system (https://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature04988.html), and I'm convinced that more accountability will incentivise reviewers to do a better job. I'm interested in hearing about others people's experiences with this system (does it work?), and if there is an easy way (such as a list) to find publications that use this system (how do I find them?).
2 Answers
I don't think there are many journals that currently use public peer review, so it's unlikely that there's a list of them. The most well-known journal that does this, I think, is F1000Research, which also powers Wellcome Open Research and Gates Open Research.
The Wikipedia article on open peer review has some useful citations touching on public peer review. (They're not quite the same thing - "open" is disclosing the names of reviewers, "public" is posting the reviews - though they often are done together.)
A lot of journals which do it like to give the impression that it's new and shiny and groundbreaking, but it's really been around quite a while by this point and is fairly well-understood, if still niche.
The example I usually use is that the Copernicus/EGU titles (all geosciences) have been doing this since around 2000, and it seems to work fairly well for them - most of the journals are well regarded in the field and I've never encountered anyone who objects on the basis of the reviewing per se. They have a fairly good acceptance rate, I believe, but that might be because the weakest material is desk-rejected before it gets to public review. There is a list of their titles here, and a process guide from Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics - which I note is the one Nature mention! - is here.
