Quoting Reviewer's Comments

Lilia brings us the good news that a paper "Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks" (with Sebastian, Carla and Andy as co-authors) has been accepted for a conference. Well done guys! This is not surprising, what is surprising is that Lilia quotes from the reviewer's comments and thereby makes them public.

Is this allowed? I thought the idea of peer reviewing is that the "peer" is protected by being anonymous (to the authors of the paper) and communicates only with the programme committee and fellow reviewers. Acting as a peer reviewer is something that needs to be done to keep the scientific community afloat, the rewards are low (seeing one's name mentioned in the proceedings is the most that can be hoped for). The verbatim posting of reviewer's comments appears to destroy the basic principle of peer reviewing.

Comments

[Lilia]

I don´t reveal any names (and I don´t have them to ask for a permission). May be you are right and I shouldn´t post it...

[Anjo]

The best use of review comments is to improve the paper! You get free advice, and the only you thing need to do if the comments indeed improved the paper is to acknowledge that the anonymous reviewer contributed. Review comments have generally very little merit otherwise.

[Seb]

I think the rewards for reviewing are so low that most reviewers don't do a very good job of it. Opening reviews up could perhaps help raise the standard. Here are a couple related references:

http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/Nature_ad.pdf

http://www.junkscience.com/news/bmjpeer.html

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1875.html

[Dude]

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[Sally Gene]

I enjoy reading through this informal place. I will surely visit you again to see if anything new appears on it.
Good luck for the future.