Nature accused of rejecting science in favour of bias

Scientific American has a surprisingly frank and critical assessment of Nature’s recent decision not to move to a double-blind peer review process. It is hard not to form the conclusion that Nature’s editors are scraping the barrel of barely-rational excuses simply to avoid a bit of hard work implementing such a system. (This is the most generous explanation of their decision, and I suppose we can all come up with others.) This conclusion is at least consistent with the tendency of modern journal editors to make the author do all of the work which traditionally they themselves have done. Authors must jump through an amazing number of stylistic, formatting, image-preparation, and typsetting hoops before a paper is accepted.

See also an earlier post of mine.