Want to know who refereed your manuscript? Or what was said about someone else's? In 50 years you'll be able to take a peek, at least for journals published by the American Institute of Physics.
AIP's new policy provides that referee reports and related correspondence with editors for both accepted and rejected papers from its journals be openly available half a century after they were written. The policy goes into effect immediately and is retroactive. With permission from the editor and the executive director of AIP, files may be made available earlier. Roughly a third of physics articles published worldwide appear in journals published by AIP (which also publishes this magazine).
The referee records will be housed in the Niels Bohr Library at AIP headquarters in College Park, Maryland. AIP is encouraging its member societies to adopt the same archiving policy.
