| Full anonymity may be valuable, if the set of a paper's reviewers has to stay fixed throughout the review process If peer review worked more like other publication workflows (where documents are handed across multiple teams that review them for different reasons), I think partial anonymity (e.g. rounding authors down to a citation-count number) might actually be useful. Basically: why can't we treat peer review like the customer service gauntlet? - Papers must pass all levels from the level they enter up to the final level, to be accepted for publication. - Papers get triaged to the inbox of a given level based on the citation numbers of the submitter. - Thus, papers from people with no known previous publications, go first to the level-1 reviewers, who exist purely to distinguish and filter off crankery/quackery. They're just there so that everyone else doesn't have to waste time on this. (This level is what non-academic publishing houses call the "slush pile.") However, they should be using criteria that give only false-positives [treating bad papers as good] but never false-negatives [treating good papers as bad.] The positives pass on to the level-2 ("normal") stream. - Likewise, papers from pre-eminent authors are assumed to not often contain stupid obvious mistakes, and therefore, to avoid wasting the submitter's time and the time of reviewers in levels 1 through N-1, these papers get routed straight to final level-N reviewers. This group is mostly made up of pre-eminent authors themselves, who have the highest likelihood of catching the smallest, most esoteric fatal flaws. (However, they're still also using criteria that requires them to be extremely critical of any obvious flaws as well. They just aren't supposed to bother looking for them first, since the assumption is that they won't be there.) - Papers from people with an average number of citations end up landing on some middle level, getting reviewed for middling-picky stuff by middling-experienced people, and then either getting bounced back for iteration at that point, or getting repeatedly handed up the chain with those editing marks pre-picked so that the reviewers on higher levels don't have to bother looking for those things and can focus on the more technically-difficult stuff. It's up to the people on the earlier levels to make the call of whether to bounce the paper back to the author for revision. (Note that, under this model, no paper is ever rejected for publication; papers just get trapped in an infinite revision loop, under the premise that in theory, even a paper fatally-flawed in its premise could be ship-of-Theseus-ed during revision into an entirely different, non-flawed paper.) You could compare this to a software toolchain — first your code is "reviewed" by the lexer; then by the parser; then by the macro expansion; then by any static analysis passes; then by any semantic-model transformers run by the optimizer. Your submission can fail out as invalid at any step. More advanced / low-level code (hand-written assembler) skips the earlier steps entirely, but that also means talking straight to something that expected pre-picked output and will give you very terse, annoyed-sounding, non-helpful errors if it does encounter a flaw that would have been caught earlier in the toolchain for HLL code. |
>under this model, no paper is ever rejected for publication; papers just get trapped in an infinite revision loop
This could mean a viable paper never gets published. Most journals require that you only submit to one journal at a time. So if it didn’t meet criteria for whatever reason (even a bad scope fit) it would never get a chance at a better fit somewhere else).