Seb's Open Research
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Friday, November 05, 2004
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More on blogging referee reports and hacking peer review
Following yesterday's post which touched on the question of blogging referee reports, several commenters on Michael Nielsen and Lance Fortnow's weblogs think this ought not to become widespread because of the chilling effect it could have on reports.
This consideration aside, on a very immediate level, it would seem rather
rude to publish what is normally understood as a private communication
without asking for permission. It would be analogous to publishing a
private email without asking first.
Daniel Lemire thinks reviews should be public from the get-go. There
are indeed journals that use open peer review. The Journal of
Interactive Media in Education, for instance, implements both private and public open peer review processes as follows:
There was an excellent article about open peer review in Nature a
couple years ago, documenting the experiments in open peer review that
were conducted by the journals Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, and the Medical Journal of Australia. Recommended reading.
And over at David Wiley's site there's a discussion of whether open peer review indeed improves quality. I suspect it strongly depends on the field, and on which conference/journal you are considering.
Finally, some biomedical researchers have been suggesting to do away with (pre-publication) peer review altogether!
 3:18:03 PM
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Wednesday, November 03, 2004
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Blow your mind
Yes! At no charge, just come over and sit for a little while at the String Coffee Table,
which brings together string theorists who discuss advanced
theoretical physics. This group blog was started at the end of last year thanks to Jacques Distler,
who has done a marvelous job of enabling the inclusion of mathematical
equations into posts authored in the Movable Type blogging system. Now
that's what I call research blogging!
Interestingly, some posts are bringing the (traditionally private) scholarly
refereeing process into the public light; see for example the post Referee reports on "SCFT deformations and Pohlmeyer invariants".
Because they are so busy, referees often do a lousy job of reviewing
submitted papers, and they often get away with it because they act
under the cover of anonymity. With authors blogging their reviews,
however, reviewers might feel pressured to be more diligent in their work.
Although they remain anonymous when authors blog their reviews, many in
their smallish research subcommunities are surely able to recognize who
wrote a particular report. And even if they aren't, mediocre reviews reflect poorly on the journal or conference.
Now here's a potential fly in the ointment: given the number of
articles that are submitted every year, if everyone took the time
needed to write good referee reports, would there be any time left to
do actual research?
2:20:45 PM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
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4/22/2006; 12:19:34 PM.
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