Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
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From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Subject: Re: v01INF1: Status - Status of comp.sources.reviewed
Message-ID: <1991Apr15.030836.21087@athena.mit.edu>
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Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
References: <scs.671464069@hela.iti.org> <16390:Apr1305:56:2091@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <nolan.671566523@helios> <6787:Apr1420:38:3991@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <1991Apr14.232818.15851@athena.mit.edu> <22409@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 91 03:08:36 GMT
Lines: 45

In article <22409@yunexus.YorkU.CA>, oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
|> Jon, with all due respect, I (and most everybody else) already know at
|> least two people who will be reviewers, just by the way they posted to
|> this newsgroup.

  As someone else has pointed out in a recent posting in this newsgroup, in
the scientific field you almost always have a good idea of which people a
journal might choose to review your paper.  In fact, when my sister's first
paper was reviewed, her and the guy in charge of her lab managed to figure out
who one of the reviewers was, because (according to her) he works in the same
field as her in is a bit of an a**hole and panned her paper unfairly so that
he would get to publish similar results before she could.

  There are almost 40 people currently in the queue to be able to review
sources for c.s.r.  If you submit a package for review, then unless you have a
good idea of what kinds of sources each of them has volunteered to review, and
of which of them are very busy and therefore unlikely to accept requests to
review from the moderator, it is no more likely that you will be able to
figure out *which* reviewers have been asked to review your submission than
that you would be able to figure out which scientists have been asked to
review an academic paper submitted by you to a journal.

  In fact, you are probably *less* likely to be able to figure it out in the
case of c.s.r.

  The question is not one of complete anonymity; there are obviously a limited
number of people who are qualified (and available) to review any particular
c.s.r submission or journal submission.  The question is one of degrees of
anonymity -- how likely are you to be able to figure out who's doing the
reviewing?  The journal review process assumes that you won't be able to, but
in many cases you can (there was a recent article in RISKS about a journal
that sent the reviewer's comments to the author, but forgot to cut off the fax
banner at the top of each page indicating the lab from which the comments were
sent :-).  The c.s.r review process will probably be no less successful than
that at keeping reviewers anonymous if they want to be; indeed, if (as Dan
seems to want) we are supposed to emulate a journal exactly, then we should
publish a complete list of exactly what kinds of software each reviewer has
signed up to review, so that submitters have a better chance of guessins who
is doing their reviewing.

-- 
Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
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jik@Athena.MIT.EDU				Allston, MA  02134
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