[HexagonalKitten]

All of which is caused by her going public with vague accusations. Had she not fought with her boss, and made the unreasonable demand of knowing who her anonymous reviewers were, she'd be able to have a nice quiet talk with a lawyer while still on the payroll, and eventually write a well sourced article about it once she left calmly and under her own power.

So no. You don't get slack once you make heinous public allegations. You'd better have your ducks in a row before attempting to tear someone down.

[geofft]

> made the unreasonable demand of knowing who her anonymous reviewers were

Why is this unreasonable?

First, they were not her reviewers. She got her paper approved by the normal, written process, i.e., a reviewer reviewed it and accepted it and thereby gave her formal permission to publish it. Then management said that anonymous people had concerns.

Furthermore, the review process does not involve anonymous review. And no similar process does. (This was not scientific peer review: no scientific process has peer reviewers from one's own institution. This was pre-submission review, and the venue would have appointed anonymous peer reviewers, almost certainly avoiding reviewers from the same institution specifically to avoid conflicts of interest.)

A more analogous process would be code review. If I made a code review, a coworker approved it, and my skip-manager said "This was reverted because some people said we couldn't ship it, but I'm not telling you who," I'd feel entirely justified in objecting. (This process is neither scientific peer review nor code review, but it's much closer to code review.)

[HexagonalKitten]

> First, they were not her reviewers.

They reviewed her paper, so tautologically they were. You seem to be suggesting that this was inappropriate though, yes?

> Furthermore, the review process does not involve anonymous review. And no similar process does.

Nope. I'm in an SV company similar to two FAANGs and it totally does. If you submit a paper and want the company to sponsor it, you'd better believe it does. Before your manager lets you even start the process on work time they'll have you meet with others above you to review the idea, and it goes to both your team's architecture review board (in engineering) and an adjacent team's review board. The reviewers aren't anonymous, quite, because you can look at who's in the groups, but they boil the requests down and present it as a list, not a set of feedback. You can ask to have anything reviewed, because it's not a one-and-done process. Some people sail through, others do it as an iterative process. And then legal looks at everything and they insist on seeing the final release version, even if you only tweaked a comma.

Of course they're stringent though, this is a new project you're proposing to release with their name on it, made in lieu of your other job.

> This was not scientific peer review: no scientific process has peer reviewers from one's own institution.

Generally your research institution, in your subfield, won't have more than 5-10 actual peers and they're all assumed to know you and probably your work. So it's not that it can't be, it's that it's usually not useful.

> almost certainly avoiding reviewers from the same institution specifically to avoid conflicts of interest.

Google has multiple interests. They're very concerned with their reputation and even if the paper didn't need more peer review (which it seems to) they clearly think it needed a second round of review.

> If I made a code review, a coworker approved it, and my skip-manager said "This was reverted because some people said we couldn't ship it, but I'm not telling you who," I'd feel entirely justified in objecting.

You'd be fine if you just said you disagreed for technical reasons, but if you actually objected and released it yourself over objection you'd be escorted out within minutes and very likely charged with unauthorized use of the work resources to do so.

They pay your salary. This job is about your work product, not your feeling of entitlement. Want academic freedom, separate it from your 9-5.