[JoPP-Public] Improving peer review for JoPP

Tue Mar 27 14:29:32 CEST 2012

ps. I'll answer my own question: a way to do that would be to explicitly state that a version of all submissions will be published, so that by the act of submitting to us authors are in fact agreeing for us to publish something.
However in this scenario:
-we may end up publishing more (duly signaled as such) crappy articles than we would wish, and
-we would be limiting the freedom of authors 

On 03/27/12, Mathieu ONeil  <mathieu.oneil at anu.edu.au> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
--
****
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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