Nature Biotechnology responds:

Noseda and McLean raise interesting points. With regard to the ability to reproduce a paper's methodology and findings, the fact that descriptions of methods in Supplementary Material online are not copy edited for grammar or clarity at Nature Biotechnology (or at any other Nature research journal for that matter) could be argued to potentially compromise the lucidness and ease with which a reader can repeat a published experiment. As the authors also point out, Nature's new guidelines (http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/gta/index.html#a5.3) for the addition of methods to its published papers provide authors with flexibility in how to present their methods within the final printed issue and online. One additional benefit to Nature's approach, not mentioned by Noseda and McLean, is that references to methods or protocols that appear in the Methods section remain in the printed paper rather than being relegated to online only (where they are less likely to be cited). We would welcome feedback from our readers as to whether they feel Nature Biotechnology should follow a similar model to Nature.