« Earmarking versus peer review | Main | Reviewers' guidelines for the Nature journals »

Bookmark in Connotea

Making protocols available to peer-reviewers

In their Correspondence "Journals should set a new standard in transparency", published in today's Nature, Robert P. Dellavalle, Kristy Lundahl, Scott R. Freeman and Lisa M. Schilling write:

We applaud your commitment, as expressed in the Editorial "Peer review and fraud" (Nature 444, 971–972; doi:10.1038/444971b 2006), to raising peer-reviewer awareness about detecting fraud. For studies involving humans, independent research ethics committees (in the United States, institutional review boards) provide the first independent critical scrutiny of research protocols. We recently examined the instructions to authors of 103 medical journals and found that none requires authors to provide to readers (as online supplementary information accompanying the publication) the protocols approved by these committees.

As concern increases about the integrity of published scientific research, we believe that biomedical journals should establish a new standard in human-research transparency. They should require authors to state at submission — and, where judged necessary, in their published articles — that the research has been approved by the relevant ethical committees. All journals publishing research on non-human animals ("Animal experiments under fire for poor design" Nature 444, 981; 2006) should do the same for non-human animal protocols.

Journals should also require authors to provide the full protocols approved by these committees for the editors and peer reviewers, and to allow the journal, if it wishes, to publish these protocols as online supplementary information accompanying publication of the main paper.
From: Nature 445, 364 (25 January 2007) | doi:10.1038/445364a; Published online 24 January 2007
We welcome comments on this proposal.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on January 25, 2007
Categories: Ethics | | Comments (1)

Comments

I understand the concerns of Dellavalle et al. but don't think that to publish ethical permits as online supplementary information is a sound idea. Ethical permits in Sweden usually disclose details of a long term research proposal many of which go well beyond the specific finds reported in a single publication. Making these openly accessible over the web would amount to placing a confidential research proposal in the public domain.

Posted by: carlos ibanez | January 29, 2007 10:30 AM

Post a comment

Comments will be reviewed by the blog editors before being published, mainly to ensure that spam and irrelevant material (such as product advertisements) are not published . Please keep your comment brief. Excessively long or offensively phrased entries will be edited. Remember this blog is for feedback and discussion of matters concerning scientific authorship or peer-review - not for drawing attention to your research.

If you want to know if a NPG journal would be interested in your research, you will need to contact the journal's editorial office, which can be done via the authors & referees website.

We strongly encourage you to use your real, full name. E-mail addresses are required in case we need to discuss your comment with you directly. We won't publish your e-mail address unless you request it.

Please enter the numbers you see below - this helps us to avoid spam. If you are having trouble with this system, you can send your comment by e-mail to 'referees at nature.com'.

please enter code

Search