The peer review process is the best process so far imagined to decide on the suitability of papers for publication in journals or conference proceedings. There are aspects that can be improved to make it rigorous, unbiased, and useful. Is a double-blind process any better than single-blind? Should we ask key questions to reviewers instead of leaving a free format to the review report? Any new ideas are welcome.
Greeting Walter,
Thank you for raising such a sensitive topic. I won't describe my answer as an answer but more as a question.
In its current form, the blind review process ensures the authors' anonymity. However, it does not protect the work from being rejected. Recently, few trends in few topics are "controlled" by few researchers. Somehow, all the related papers to these trends are sent for review to the above-mentioned researchers (i.e., who control the trend). These researchers, most of the time, reject these papers for unfunded reasons.
This is a dilemma for the editor and the authors. The editor must send the work to experienced researchers. However, the chances of the work being published are reduced once sent to the researchers who control the "trend", especially due to competitively and funding reasons. On the other side, if the work is sent for review to non-experienced researchers, the review will be weak and untrustworthy.
Personally, I don't see a solution for such a problem. However, it is worth noticing that this problem is limited to few trends, at least as much as I've experienced.
Warmest regards.
Here are several previous discussions about peer review and how to improve it:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_the_peer-review_itself_scientific
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_can_we_obtain_a_better_peer_reviewing
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_do_you_think_we_might_we_improve_peer_review_and_the_quality_of_scientific_publications
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_prepared_are_article_reviewers_to_make_more_gentle_reviews
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_would_you_deal_with_expert_referees_reviewers_that_send_unprofessional_reviews
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_peer-review_censorship_or_necessary_evil
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Open_peer-review_is_full_transparency_possible
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_blind_peer-review_honest_Does_it_help_or_disfavor_achieving_an_objective_review_of_journal_papers
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which-i-more-suitable-for-scientfic-journals-blind-peer-review-or-open-peer-review-or-combination-between-the-two
What about some sort of "a posteriori" review?
Peer review is often superficial. Reviewers cannot have access to the code or data used in the paper, they cannot check them self the validity of the work, most of the time they are more worried to be cited than anything else.
Maybe is time to change the way we publish scientific research and allow each publication to gain its good or bad reputation with the time allowing other researcher to provide feedbacks. The main idea is to avoid the lengthy review process, allow the publication to go live after the initial editor selection. Let the reader provide public comments to the authors and let the authors respond.
The paper should then become some sort of live document that can be updated/corrected as results of those comments. Each time the paper is updated a new version is released and each version can be accessed by the readers.
Something like GitHub but for papers
I am not saying to add a "like" button in the paper paper page, but we should think about a new metric that can be used to measure the validity and the novelty of a work.
I am not sure how to this could be implemented and how is actually feasible. But I would welcome a change in this direction
Andrea, I believe that what you are suggesting is going to be the future of scientific publishing, It will take a while. For the time being I would like to envision some incremental improvements to the current practice. More to come.
Dear Professor Lacarbonara,
I think it should be not at all blind or double blinded. Sometimes I saw people without a PhD degree were invited to review papers, it is alright to invite PhD students. In some cases authors contacted me to accept the invitation to review the paper. Later I found one author was in the Editorial board. Double submissions I received several times to review. Luckily both journals assigned me to review the same paper.
Based on these negative issues in PEER process I as associate editor in journals do very fair handling.
I dont like the fact that when your article is rejected for some silly reasons , you can't respond to the reviewers or the editor's comments, this needs to change.
Said, I agree that a careful peer review process should invite experts holding a PhD degree. It is the responsibility of the EiC and the Handling Editors to ensure that the right experts are carefully selected. This is quite challenge nowadays due to the proliferation of journals. Often reviewers are abused by multiple invitations from too many journals and for works that are not fully centered on their interests. Let's keep the ball rolling.
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