Anonymous reviewing

Sebastian Fiedler comes back on whether the comments from anonymous reviewers should be made public. Sebastian, a co-author of the paper, writes:

Sorry Anjo, I don't get it. If the peer is "protected by being anonymous" to the authors, what's wrong with making these evaluations public? And from a reviewers point of view... why wouldn't I want other[s] to read my argumentation for accepting or rejecting a certain proposal? Wouldn't this be very instructive, especially for younger researchers? ... or should we rather be afraid of "pseudo-objectivity" being exposed? ;-)

There are limits to what can (and should) be discussed in public. If we take this case as an example, the four comments Lilia posted are hardly relevant, three of them even go off-topic subject to the paper. My advice would therefore be to more or less ignore the comments and continue with the final version of the paper. (Beyond the point, I could probably figure out the names of the reviewers given a list, none are native English speaking and some of the comments have native languages in which articles either do not exist or are less relevant. Use of language tells a lot about a person, it is not a fingerprint, but if the list is relatively short such as a list of reviewers in the proceedings ....).

In general, the situation is very complex. Authors discuss reviewer's comments between each other, and probably also with other colleagues. Reviewers do the same. Now if a reviewer's comment goes public and is subsequently the subject of public scrutiny, the author might not know who the reviewer is, but the reviewer will nevertheless be comprised by his/her colleagues. And being anonymous, theoretically, s/he has no line of defence to the public at large.

My answers to Sebastian's questions would therefore be: (a) discuss reviewers comments with anybody you think relevant including experienced colleagues, your mother, your cat, but don't do so in public: this is the learning experience for the author; (b) if you think a reviewer made a serious mistake, write a letter to the programme committee, but don't do so in public: this is the learning experience for the reviewer.

Reviewing is extremely difficult and good reviewing is an art. A tip a colleague gave me is to write in such a way that the authors think "I would like to cooperate with this anonymous reviewer".

Comments

[Ton Zijlstra]

Hi Anjo,

I'm not sure I understand how talking about the review comments to friends/family/colleagues/pets is different from 'going public'. To me what I do when I blog things IS talking about it with colleagues and friends etc.