Actually, I don't think the visibility of public reviews would be likely to result in
higher quality reviews. Blind review exists (at least in part) to protect the reviewers
and enable them to provide an honest opinion on a submission without having to worry about
the retribution for a negative review (e.g., negative reviews on their work in return, not
getting recommended for funding or promotion, etc.). Such worries would be particularly
problematic for junior faculty or students. I would expect signed reviews to be much more
anodyne. You might also imagine the reverse, that someone might submit a falsely positive
review hoping for some reward down the road. Blind reviewing does create some problems,
but AFAIK it's nearly universal in academic publishing. It would be easy to permit or
require anonymous comments though. Or perhaps revealing the names only if the paper is
accepted.
Double blind review (meaning that the authors' names aren't known to the
reviewers) would also be more difficult in this system. The intent of double blind
reviewing is to encourage reviewers to review the paper and not the author. On the other
hand, it's often pretty easy to guess who the author is even without the name attached
to the paper, which may be why double-blind reviews are not universal.
It's also worth noting that the main problem with peer review is getting reviewers at
all, since there's little reward for reviewing and it takes a fair amount of effort to
write a good review--note that a paper might be 40 pages and a review several pages long
(at least in my field--there's a lot of variation in publication norms from field to
field). One argument for reviewing is that you get to read papers earlier, but if everyone
can do that anyway, then there's not much incentive to spend the effort crafting a
careful review afterwards. It could be though that the volume of comments or the
discussion among commenters would compensate for less depth in any single review--it would
be interesting to see how that balanced out. Given the small size of research communities
and the ratio of readers to contributors on Wikipedia, I wouldn't expect a flood of
comments on papers in most subdisciplines though.
On 22-May-2012, at 6:46 PM, FT2 <ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
3. A key change would be that reviewers'
identities would be public.
Although this would remove the usual complete separation of author and
reviewer, it also means that the reviews, the relationships, and the
approach will be completely public and itself open to scrutiny for all
future time. For those whose repuytation and career rest on clearly
ethical behavior in their academic work, this might be if anything at least
as powerful an incentive to review within community guidelines. Future
emergence of any untoward behavior, or any strange attitudes or unexpected
review posts at review will be picked up on, and this total transparency
has the potential to be as effective an encouragement of highest standards
and deterrent of ethical breach as any formal separation.
Kevin Crowston
Syracuse University Phone: +1 (315) 443-1676
School of Information Studies Fax: +1 (815) 550-2155
348 Hinds Hall Web:
http://crowston.syr.edu/
Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 USA