[4][5] As editor of BMC's open-access Journal of Biology, she introduced pioneering improvements in the process of peer review, including the ability for authors to opt out of re-review.
Noted theoretical biologist Robert May described Robertson as "exceptionally good and well informed" in explaining his willingness to write an unusually large number of News and Views pieces for Nature.
[33] In 1976, while still at Nature, Robertson began to work with a team of scientists led by Bruce Alberts and James Watson on a new textbook, Molecular Biology of the Cell, which was published by Garland Science in 1983.
In 1998 Robertson joined New Science Press as Managing Director,[41] where she initiated a series of Primers in Biology with a modular design intended to make teaching easier.
[47] Announcing the new policy in 2009, Robertson commented that it is "the job of journal editors to promote the dissemination of research results rather than to obstruct it, [and] it is the author who is in the end accountable for the quality and validity of the paper that is published.
[49] Robertson's editorials often focused on open questions[50] and unacknowledged "dirty secrets", using Sydney Brenner's term "Ockham's Broom" to refer to the practice of sweeping inconvenient facts under the rug.