Life introduced open peer review in 2014. The linked presentation is an editorial published at http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/5/1/212/htm providing an introduction. An accompanying blog post can be found at http://blog.mdpi.com/2014/05/16/introducing-open-peer-review-to-the-journal-life/, and the first paper published with open peer review at http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/4/2/217. Since then, the authors of 19 out of 59 papers have opted to have the review reports published, although only a small number of reviewers agree to identify themselves with the published review reports.

Peer review is the most widely accepted model for setting a threshold of published scholarly material. With the move to digital publishing, it has come under attack with suggestions that it is 'broken', overloading reviewers and possibly no longer fit for purpose. This presentation discusses the challenges for peer review and some emerging new models. Ultimately, we may need to take a step back to ask what peer review is for and how these aims can best be achieved.