The latest experiment in biological publication is a new pan-biology journal named Biology Direct from BioMed Central (www.biology-direct.com). The author selects referees from the editorial board who then decide whether to review the manuscript in detail. This decision appears to amount to a decision to publish. The referees can also choose to publish signed comments alongside the manuscript. The key to an authoritative editorial process lies in constructive peer review. Biology Direct editors have rightly noted that forced publication of full signed reports from referees is ill-advised: top journals invariably require substantive revision before publication, thus, final referee reports only rarely contain a detailed scientific critique and earlier reports are essentially out of context as the accepted manuscript was revised to address them. Biology Direct states that published reports aim to “provide pointers as to the content and value of a publication”. We agree that this is useful, and we have a long-established 'News and Views' section where experts, occasionally referees of the paper, present such pointers. Although there is only one News and Views mansuscript per paper, its analysis is thorough and developmental editing maximizes accessibility. Thus far the review process of Biology Direct does not diverge greatly, with the exception that referees are known (at least to the authors) and that they are drafted from the limited pool of the editorial board. We argue that this limits both the amount of technical expertise and editorial opinion to a finite group of people. We select the most authoritative experts while carefully avoiding potential conflicts of interest – we believe our system better avoids conflicts as we honour referee exclusion requests and explicitly ask for declarations of conflicts before review. Furthermore, impartial editors screen for possible biases in reports. We also argue that our editorial opinion is more informed by integrating the views of a handful of referees and editors. We have often considered signed reports, and indeed we allow this if the referee so desires. However, in our experience this tends to select against incisive critique: too much is at stake.

Finally, a call for fairness: we absolutely rely on constructive peer-reviewing. Editors and referees should judge the dataset in hand, and not the reputation or record of the authors. We have come across cases where authors are 'ostracized' from a community and peers refuse to judge their work – the inevitable outcome is that decisions are less informed.

Links to previous editorials on policy matters can be found on Connotea (keyword: policies).