[Journal] Review process

[Scott Mitchell]

On 23-Sep-2009, at 16:23 , Tyler Mitchell wrote:

> We have a spot where we need to define our review process on the  
> site.  I'm new to anything but the most informal review processes.   
> Would someone be willing to help populate it?
>
> Attached PDF shows the info required - I can give access to that  
> page or you can email me the content directly.  It may also be worth  
> discussing some aspects.

One aspect I think merits discussion is the "blindness" policy.  If  
you accept the default instructions that OJS offers to give people  
about blind reviewing, it uses a double blind model, i.e. both the  
reviewers and authors are anonymous.  I'm not necessarily against a  
double blind model if people really want it, but in general I find it  
(a) is a pain for the authors, and (b) has feasibility problems.

More specifically, what I mean by it being a pain for the authors is  
that to keep the authors anonymous requires them to go through the  
manuscript and make sure that they have removed their name from all  
document properties including the metadata of the word processing  
file, PDF properties, etc etc, as well as making all their self- 
references show just Author,Date, instead of the real citations.    
While some self-referencing is rightly criticized as self-serving, it  
is also usually necessary to a degree to explain how a given paper  
builds on past work.

By feasibility problems I mean that even if the authors do all of the  
above properly, for any reviewer familiar with work in the field, it  
is still usually at least partially apparent who some or all of the  
authors are, because the reviewer probably knows some of the previous  
work that has been cited, even if the authors names are taken off the  
list.

For what it's worth (maybe for these reasons?) all but one or two  
journals I've ever submitted to or reviewed for have just a one-way  
blind review policy, i.e. the reviewers are anonymous, but not the  
authors.  Some of them even allow THIS restriction to be lifted if the  
reviewer chooses (I'm not so sure I agree with that option, but  
perhaps its useful in certain cases).

My two cents, then, are for just a one way blindness policy.

Opinions?

Scott Mitchell