Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean. Shorter, more focused posts specialising in astronomy and data visualisation.

Friday 11 January 2019

Who watches the watchers ?

Interesting. In general I like the idea of a more open review process. After acceptance, it would be helpful to see the referee reports to be able to track the changes to the paper (everyone forgets when the reviewers provide extremely helpful suggestions, while everyone remembers those times when the reviewer made the paper worse - yet both do occur). But posting the reviews of rejected papers ? That doesn't sit right : the point of rejecting a paper should be that there's no need for more discussion on it. Of course you can post whatever you want on a blog, but that doesn't mean you should : it will only attract more attention anyway.

The biggest change I would make to the review system would be to have a more clearly-defined set of guidelines as to what the reviewer can/should do, e.g. how much control they have compared to the authors. The amount of transparency should be explicit and up-front - different levels may be appropriate in different cases, particularly when public preprint services are used. I don't see a good underlying principle to follow; neither total transparency nor total opacity seem sensible to me. I favour an "if in doubt, accept" approach - rejection should only be used when the paper is fundamentally flawed.

https://neuroneurotic.net/2019/01/10/an-open-review-of-open-reviewing/

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