[JoPP-Public] Improving peer review for JoPP

Tue Mar 27 13:26:28 CEST 2012

Hi Christian, all

Thanks for commenting. I can't respond address your points straight away but I am curious about how you propose to implement this part of your proposal : "((publishing all versions of a paper from the first submitted one (or, at least, the last negotiated version of each paper))) __without allowing the authors to pull out.__ "? 
How do we stop people from pulling out? Sign a blood oath over the Internet? ;-)

cheers

Mathieu

On 03/27/12, Christian Siefkes  <christian at siefkes.net> wrote:
> Hi Mathieu and all,
> 
> On 03/26/2012 04:17 PM, Mathieu ONeil wrote:
> > Openness undoubtedly has great virtues, but in the case of academic
> > publishing it can also generate some bad side-effects.
> > 
> > For this issue of JoPP five papers were sent out for review. Three of the
> > papers will be published with reviews and signals. Two other papers were not
> > great. Reviewers worked long and hard to address shortcomings and make
> > suggestions.
> > 
> > One author decided that it would not be possible to make these adjustments
> > though much time kept being added.
> > 
> > The other agreed to make changes but then used the time excuse as well as
> > sickness.
> > 
> > There is nothing preventing either author from now submitting their
> > much-improved papers to another journal...
> > 
> > In my view, we should try to address this obvious waste of reviewer (and
> > editorial) work/energy.
> 
> hmm, isn't this a problem of being (maybe) not open enough instead of being
> too open? In the experience from my own academic this, this is a quite
> possible scenario in the traditional peer review process: reviewers send
> criticism and suggestions, the author might then revise the paper and send
> back a revised version, or submit the revised version elsewhere. Especially
> if a paper is re-submitted by multiple journals (after being refused -- with
> reviewer feedback -- by each of them), it would cause reviewers a lot of
> work. (Say if there are 3 reviewers per paper and you submit it sequentially
> to 4 journals, you would already occupy a dozen reviewers, while none of
> them would benefit of the work already done by others, since they don't know
> about it.) Also, if you re-submit a text sufficiently often, it becomes more
> and more likely to be accepted somewhere by pure chance, almost regardless
> of the quality of the paper, I would presume.
> 
> The only chance to avoid that would be more openness, not less, i.e.
> publishing all versions of a paper from the first submitted one (or, at
> least, the last negotiated version of each paper), without allowing the
> authors to pull out. Not sure if we want to go this way, but blaming
> "openness" for the shortcomings of the current approach strikes my as
> definitively wrong.
> 
> Best regards
> 	Christian
> 
> -- 
> |------- Dr. Christian Siefkes ------- christian at siefkes.net -------
> | Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/ | Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
> |    Peer Production Everywhere:       http://peerconomy.org/wiki/
> |---------------------------------- OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 --
> UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that
> would also stop you from doing clever things.
>         -- Doug Gwyn
> 
> 
> 
--
****
Dr Mathieu O'Neil
Adjunct Research Fellow
Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute
College of Arts and Social Science
The Australian National University
email: mathieu.oneil[at]anu.edu.au
web: http://adsri.anu.edu.au/people/visitors/mathieu.php
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