A common response to posting peer reviews (e.g. eLife, EMBO J) is it's wasted effort because no-one will read them. Well, breaking news: not many people read the paper either...

EMBO estimate ~10% of readers look at the peer reviews. Given a peer review takes ~5 hours to generate and one would certainly conclude a paper takes >50 hours to generate, then a readers/hour-worked calculation surely argues in favor of posting peer reviews - no?

@richardsever @jkpritch It would be better to assess the impact of posting reviews. It’s a good thing for transparency, but I’ve not seen a comment on social media, in a talk, or in a paper stating “this paper claims X, but the reviewers were not convinced” or had a colleague tell me that they were going to cite a paper but didn’t based on posted reviews. Could change, but seems more likely that the stamp of publication (yes, even at eLife) will dominate.

@jkpritch @richardsever I’m excepting those papers for which a problem was identified post-publication and therefore there was a lot of interest in the reviews re: the question “how did this get published?”

Other than that, I just haven’t seen posted reviews affect the course of science. I’d love to see counterexamples, as I want to believe it’s useful.

@StearnsLab @jkpritch @richardsever Isn't this exclusion a little bit like saying, well, why have the black box in the jetliner, since they almost never crash? (This also excludes a lot of other arguments in favor of posting peer reviews—for example, I rarely look at them as a way to judge a paper, but I often look at them as an insight into editorial process...)

@marcdionne @StearnsLab @jkpritch @richardsever I personally regularly read reviewer comments and author responses for papers that are bang on my research interests at eLife, EMBO J, Nat Comm etc. There's a lot to learn there, scientifically and rhetorically, and I wish I had access to this when I was a PhD student and postdoc to understand the ins and outs of peer review.

@christlet @marcdionne @StearnsLab @jkpritch @richardsever Sometimes reviewers put forward great hypotheses or propose experiments that are rightfully considered by the editor & authors outside the scope of the paper, but are great scientific discussions. They remind me of a vanishing genre: transcripts of workshop discussions. I first learned #immunology from the volumes of Basel Tolerance workshop - they are incredible

cc @mucida

https://books.google.pt/books/about/The_Tolerance_Workshop.html?id=3VMezQEACAAJ&redir_esc=y