Should we delete all records including peer reviews of the paper? We know that journals are investing time, energy, and money to process papers, so it may seem fair to some editors to retain rejected papers for the purpose of performing analysis on the their editorial process. The question is—who has the right to access this source? The journal? Who is the journal? The journal is not limited to editors. All of the people (authors, reviewers, section editors, copy editors, etc) have invested time or money. Some of them are unpaid (reviewers). Do the editors invest more? I think it is not fair granting access to editors and not others (even the readers).

On the other hand, if we decide to give access to people other than the editors, many serious issues may arise that are not controllable. If we decide to grant access to ALL, it means that we have somehow agreed to publish rejected papers. In addition, the authors usually don’t like to make their rejected papers (and the reason for the rejection) public. This may be a serious concern regarding the rejected clinical research papers with potential misconducts on patients. Currently, open peer review journals are only open regarding published papers. Is there any journal with open access to some part of its archive (eg, rejected titles or under review titles)? I don’t know. Even in the case of Internet drafts as  used by Internet Engineering Task Force (http://www.ietf.org/ID.html), rejected papers are no longer retained. I wonder if there is any way to retain the declined papers and avoid these debates.

Mahmoud Saghaei
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Research in Medical Sciences
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While an archive of all journal correspondence is technically feasible (see http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/28/070528fa_fact_wilkinson), I'm not aware of any journal currently creating such an archive.

Such an archive (especially for journals with high impact such as Nature, Science, NEJM, or JAMA) would be a valuable resource for researchers of peer review and historians of science.

All stakeholders would have to be aware of the ongoing archiving and have the option of opting out of it.

I think there would also need to be a cooling off period (5 years? 10 years?) before archive material could be made available.

Lastly, questions of who pays for setting up the archive and who pays to access the archive will need careful thought.

Robert Dellavalle
Dermatology Section editor, UpToDate
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In case it helps make the case, see this letter to the editor of Nature just 10 days ago (May 30, 2007), arguing that journals should archive their records and correspondence, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7144/full/447528d.html

I blogged an excerpt here http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_05_27_fosblogarchive.html#2852164764331559678

Another blogger, Bill Hooker, endorsed the idea here http://www.sennoma.net/main/archives/2007/05/damn_good_idea.php

Peter Stuber