Thanks to Monica for passing this along:

A New Model for Peer Review? Peer Reviewers Comments are Open for All to See in New Biology Journal, from the Issues in Scholarly Communication blog

BioMed Central has launched Biology Direct, a new online open access journal with a novel system of peer review. The journal will operate completely open peer review, with named peer reviewers’ reports published alongside each article. The author’s rebuttals to the reviewers comments are also published.

Actually this isn’t completely novel: Ariadne has been doing this since 1996 (Open Peer Review & Argumentation: Loosening the Paper Chains on Journals), & in 1999 BMJ was in the process of implementing this (Opening up BMJ peer review), but I don’t know how that implementation went. Still, it’ll be interesting to follow this & see how it goes. Any new model for peer review is interesting, as far as I’m concerned. I have issues with (the fiction of) the double-blind peer review process, so any alternative is a worthwhile experiment, as far as I’m concerned.