[Journal] Need Volunteers

[Rafal Wawer]

Kalimera Dimitris,
Welcome on board! (-:

For the secton editor working on OJS assuring double-blind review is not that difficult. You just remove authors' names in the text sent to reviewers. OJS cares for the rest, as every decision must go through the section editor and there is no direct connection between author and reviewer. You have to remember to check reviewers' comments thought, whether they are accidentaly signed. (-;

IMO assuring double-blind review is a must at least in the peer review section. Recently I had an interesting conversation with one of professors about OpenAccess journals. Good publications tend to go to indexed journals although OpenAccess seem to promiss wider dissmination and citations... "Open journals do not have calculated IF" and IMO not applying good editorial practise won't help in taking them seriously. (-; 
Everyone says that OpenAcces is future, everyone complains about the commercial titles - "robbing authors from coyrights and money". As author you pay for the paper to be published, you loose the rights to it and everyone has to pay to read it. On the other hand from scientific point fo view, OpenAcces is still not taken seriously enough, so the scientists (especially those mature ones) complain but don't do much to change the status quo. They also complain, that open journals are often quite messy - "gorilla journals" (-; as basing upon volountary work is often a sunstantial challange - I think we know it to be true (-; 
For me is is a pitty, that through "traditional" scientific publication system, the access to knowledge, especially in the environmental domain, is closed or limited for the developing countries. 

Best regards:
Raf

Dr. Rafal Wawer
K.U.Leuven
R&D Division SADL (Spatial Application Division)
Celestijnenlaan 200e bus 2224
BE-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
Belgium
tel. 0032 16 329731



 

-----Original Message-----
From: newsletter-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:newsletter-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Dimitris Kotzinos
Sent: 09 February 2010 08:26
To: newsletter at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [Journal] Need Volunteers

Landon,

I can do the Peer Review Section.
I will just need to know what is there and for you to add me as a section editor.

As for the blind review it usually goes both ways: the reviewer does not know the authors' names and the authors never learn who the reviewers were.
But if we are talking for an article or two there is no need for the section editors to make things amazingly complicated - we can trust them that they will find the proper reviewers if they cannot or do not want to review them by themselves. Moreover we are not a peer reviewed journal so we do not need to be extremely strict, as long as we keep the good practices and defend the name of the journal.

Dimitris
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