Inspired by the discussion on another website, I am thinking about a new journal with the following attributes:
1. Has its own arXiv service so that submitted papers become instantly public. I can see three benefits of doing this: 1) instant copyright protection. The authors do not have to worry that somebody (or possible reviewers) might steal their ideas; 2) the community can provide some feedbacks for improvement even before the paper goes through a more "rigorous" peer review; 3) reduce the possibility of duplicating effort. Since the paper is instantly available, it should discourage those who are working on very similar ideas to either stop re-inventing the wheels or to improve on it. I know there is a general arXiv server (https://arxiv.org/). I am not sure how many in my field (I am in engineering) are using it for uploading pre-published papers or watching for new ideas. If such an arXiv service is associated with a particular journal, many of us who are interested in that journal might want to get alerts of those papers too. There is one side effect and I don't know whether it is good or bad. It will reduce the number of re-submissions, thus # of papers we need to review and publish, because if a paper, already publically available through one journal's arXiv, is not accepted for official publication, the authors will not simply resubmit to another journal without significant revision to address the deficiencies.
2. Public peer review comments and author responses and editorial correspondence. The reviewers will remain anonymous for obvious reasons. The rest of the community can comment on comments/responses/correspondence, etc after the paper is accepted and in final shape. This transparency and the community "scrutiny” can motivate the reviewers/editors/authors to be more professional and objective. This way, we retain the complete story of the paper and the peer review comments/author responses can help us understand the paper better. Since it is also open to community scrutiny after publication, it will encourage more rigorous scholarship.
3. Impact factor for individual paper based on some type of metrics (review scores, citations, comments/reviews/votes from the community, etc.)
I know there are many editors and authors on this website. I will greatly appreciate any of your comments/thoughts. If you know one with some or all of these attributes, please let me know.
Farid, malicious opinions can be removed. The people who are commenting although anonymous to the community, but their identifies are known to the editor. Anyone who are not activing professionally will be warned and removed.
Of course, different proofs can be allowed. It just try to reduce the possibility of accepting almost exactly the same staff because the time it currently takes to go through the peer-review process and remain unknown to the community.
I am not quite understand what (3) and (4) you are referring to. If you are talking about the benefits of an arXiv for a specific journal, arXiv is already available
These days, any reputatable journal has the software to check a signficant portion of the submitted manuscript whether it is already available on the internet or not. If the idea is the same, people can easily trace to the original. The academic community should be able to judge who has the original idea first. Internet is a permanent presence now.
Presentation How to publish paper?
Presentation "IF YOU WANT TO...", by: Asst. Prof. Dr. Emad Kamil
Regards,
Emad
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