PeerTax: Investigating the taxonomy of peer reviews

Peer review is integral to the publication process of scholarly articles, and performs a vital quality control function over the work undertaken by the article's authors. This is a crucial step given the far-reaching implications for society that scientific discoveries often have. Albeit necessary, the peer-review process is far from perfect and suffers quite some criticism within the scientific community. In an effort to address some of this criticism, eLife operates a more transparent form of peer review in which the assessments are published together with the work. This practice has met generally positive feedback from authors and reviewers alike. In their current state, however, published peer reviews are in essence a page-long technical report for the benefit of the paper's authors.