Several journals are already making anonymized reviewers' reports public for published papers, as Daniel Mietchen proposes (Nature 473, 452; 2011). These include Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (see http://go.nature.com/qamrfc) and The EMBO Journal (see Nature 468, 29–31; 2010). But at the European Molecular Biology Organization, we do not see an equitable way to publish referee reports on rejected manuscripts.

Instead, we favour the transfer between journals of rejected manuscripts, along with full referee reports that could be made public after acceptance of the paper. An extension of this might be to release referee names after several years, or to sign the reports with anonymized digital identifiers that could be read by official bodies to help evaluate academic performance.