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@gmail.com wrote:
- 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