Deborah Sweet on Nature Portfolio Quality, Peer Review, Retractions, and Reproducibility

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/03/14

Deborah Sweet, Executive Vice President for Journals at Nature Portfolio, she has a long career in high-impact scientific publishing, including leadership roles at Cell Press and experience launching and guiding major titles. She joined Springer Nature in 2022 and later moved into top-level leadership for Nature Portfolio journals, focusing on editorial excellence, trust, and the systems that keep peer review and corrections credible at global scale. Her vantage point is ideal for discussing publishing integrity, the meaning of “quality,” and how elite journals handle the pressures of prestige, speed, and scrutiny. 

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Deborah Sweet, Executive Vice President for Journals at Nature Portfolio, about what “high-quality” publishing means under global prestige pressure. Sweet emphasizes people and process: expert editors, methodological integrity, transparency, and stewardship of the scientific record. She notes that emerging technologies accelerate discovery but also enable new forms of abuse, including risks not yet imagined. Sweet argues that corrections and retractions should carry less stigma, because openness strengthens science’s self-correction. Evidence-backed peer-review tweaks include statistical review and some forms of open review. Reproducibility, she says, begins with methods and data and code availability.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the meaning of high-quality publishing inside a top-tier portfolio?  

Deborah Sweet: In my experience, it all comes down to the people, and the interaction between our expert editorial team and researchers as they work with to bring influential research to the eyes of the world.   Our team curates and advances rigorous research through strong editorial stewardship, consistent standards of methodological integrity and transparency, and processes that actively improve the research rather than just evaluate it.  In post-publication surveys, authors frequently comment on the positive role their handling editor played in helping them to shape their paper and respond to reviewer feedback.  We have a shared commitment across our journals to uphold high standards and act as stewards of the scientific record to build trust among authors, readers, reviewers, institutions, and the general public.  Having the opportunity to do this on journals like ours is both an honor and a responsibility that I know everyone across our team works hard to live up to.   

Jacobsen: Which threats worry you most, e.g., paper mills, perverse incentives, etc.? 

Sweet: We live in an environment of rapid change, especially in the realm of technology development, and that of course impacts the research enterprise and publishing landscape as well.  Much of this change is very exciting – think about how much a tool like AlphaFold can help move research forward, for instance.  New approaches are changing the way we consume and analyze information, the way we solve problems, and even the way we learn.  But, as with many technological developments, there are negatives and downsides as well.  The very approaches that enable us to move the research and discovery process forward more quickly also enable more rapid and extensive developments of challenges that can undermine it.  The threats that worry me most are the ones we haven’t yet thought of, because that means we aren’t prepared for them or taking preventative action.  But I also have a lot of confidence in the research community and our desire to be a positive force in global society, and then in turn in our role as publishers in helping to support and facilitate that.  I also think that even with the abundance of new tools, the value of carefully reviewed and curated information will remain strong, because we will all still need resources we can trust.  I try to keep my focus in that direction – what we can do to move forward and make a positive difference – rather than on negatives that could hold us back.  

Jacobsen: How should non-experts think appropriately about retractions and corrections as part of science’s self-correction mechanism? 

Sweet: There is a lot of stigma associated with post-publication corrections and retractions, far more than I think there ought to be.  Corrections and retractions can happen for a wide range of reasons, and if we can encourage a culture of being open about correcting errors when they occur, we will improve the robustness and value of the scientific record.  Science is by its very nature a self-correcting process, and while most of that self-correction comes through further studies and adjustment of conclusions with additional data, if information comes to light showing that a previous analysis or conclusion was misleading, we all benefit if that is pointed out not pushed aside.  I do need to acknowledge that there are of course some situations where a retraction is based on active deception or misconduct, and those cases are very unfortunate.  But, if we could do more to spread the view that a correction or retraction is not necessarily a blot on an author’s or a journal’s record, and can even be a mark of integrity, I hope we’d be able to encourage self-correction even more.   

Jacobsen: What reforms to peer review have real evidence behind them? 

Sweet: It’s difficult to do meaningful, controlled, studies of interventions in peer review.  The value and impact of a given intervention or change in approach can also vary depending on the topic area of the paper and the type of journal that is conducting the peer review.  Some that have yielded measurable improvements include adding an expert statistical reviewer, which is common in some subject areas such as medicine, and conducting open peer review (i.e. revealing reviewer names), which some journals do routinely but can lead to concerns from reviewers about negative repercussions of a critical review.  Even double-anonymous peer review, while supported by some studies as reducing some forms of bias, doesn’t have robust indications of improvements in outcomes or reduction in other forms of bias (see this paper for more information).  

If you’d like to know more about this topic, there’s a meta-analysis paper published in BMC Medicine (link here) that looks at 22 different intervention tests and discusses which of them led to measurable improvement in peer review, and another in JAHA that does a related analysis of reviewer-oriented interventions which found some improvements, although often at the expense of speed.  

In my experience, some of the greatest value is at an editorial level in choosing appropriate reviewers who can comment on the various different aspects of a paper with the level of expertise needed, and then also in editorial synthesis to interpret the reviews and work with the authors towards their final publication.     

Jacobsen: How do you balance novelty with robustness? 

Sweet: I don’t think of novelty and robustness as opposing forces that we need to balance or trade off; they are both important.  In fact, we need them to go together.  Our editors and reviewers work hard to ensure that the papers we publish have data and analyses that support the conclusions being presented strongly enough for us to accept them for publication.  Of course, for a new observation or conclusion being reported for the first time, there aren’t at that time other studies that make the same point, and sometimes for pioneering work that breaks new ground it’s not possible to control for every possible alternative explanation.  That backup comes over time as other researchers build on and extend the work.  In the end, what matters most is that when we publish a new finding, readers can trust that it has a solid and rigorous foundation that the research community can build on to take it forward.     

Jacobsen: What role should journals play in reproducibility? 

Sweet: In the fields I am most familiar with (biomedical science), and across many others as well, the biggest key to ensuring reproducibility of results is detailed and accurate reporting of research methods.  Researchers have increasingly come to appreciate that even minor variations in equipment, reagents, or methodological approach can make a significant difference to experimental outcomes.  This is why the Nature Portfolio journals pioneered the use of detailed and comprehensive reporting checklists for research articles, including making use of external standard guidelines such as CONSORT (for clinical trials) and PRISMA (for systematic reviews and meta-analyses) where they are available.  We also require authors to make clear statements about the availability of data and code, again to support reproducibility and onward studies.  Although ensuring that these steps are complete can involve significant work for both authors and our editorial team, we believe that by taking this rigorous approach to transparent reporting we are making an important contribution to the reproducibility and integrity of the research record overall.  We have also supported replication studies, for example in this pioneering project related to work published in Nature Human Behaviour, and journals across our portfolio, including Nature itself, explicitly welcome consideration of replication studies.  In addition, transparent peer review, which is increasingly being adopted across our journal portfolio, can further help because it allows readers to see what questions reviewers raised about the paper and how the authors answered them, giving additional perspective and insight.  

Jacobsen: How is Nature Portfolio approaching open access transitions institutionally? 

Sweet: Our overall goal is to offer options for our authors and our institutional customers so we can work with them to find an approach that meets their needs, and then also support the needs and goals of the research community as those continue to evolve.  Across our portfolio, we have a number of fully open access journals, with different subject coverages and publication goals, which authors can choose between.  In addition, Nature and the Nature Research Journals follow a hybrid model, in which authors can choose to publish open access if they wish to.   We are also seeing growing interest in transformative agreements for the hybrid journals in our portfolio.  These combine support for open access publishing for an institution’s authors with read access to the portion of the content that is not published open access.  I would encourage any institutions that are interested in this type of approach to discuss it with relevant representatives from our team and explore options.   

Jacobsen: During high-attention moments, how do you prevent prestige narratives from distorting understanding of science? 

Sweet: These types of situations can be challenging, especially if the narrative has strayed away from points that have evidence-based support.  In my view, our best approach is to shift the focus back to evidence, transparency, and clarity about methods, and use clear explanations about what the data and evidence do and do not show.  At Nature Portfolio, we can also point to our editorial independence, and our focus on upholding rigor in all that we choose to publish in our journals.  Our press team also plays an active role in communication about important new advances that we publish to the broader world.  They focus strongly on making sure that research is presented in an engaging and accurate way, to help the public appreciate its significance and meaning.  I view supporting communication about research advances to the wider public as an important part of our role as a publisher.   We have a strong platform, which we can use to help share accurate, evidence-based information in a way that helps build public trust and can counterbalance any potential distortions that may occur. 

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Debbie. 

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