RE: SAGE rolls out rewards program for all journal reviewers

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btinternet.com>]

David is aware of how journals work from his days at Elsevier. 
Editors (and editorial boards) are very important to publishers 
for the reasons rehearsed in this recent correspondence and in 
spite of what some librarians think publishers are very aware of 
this fact.

Oddly enough a senior editor of a journal has more control over 
the way the journal is marketed and the way the editorial 
processes are organised if he is the editor of a journal owned by 
a commercial publisher than he or she is should the journal be 
owned by a learned society.

Most editors in my experience are much keener to showcase the 
impact factor of their journal than to say anything very 
descriptive about peer review mechanism as a selling point to the 
best potential authors.

However David is right in suggesting that I exaggerated.

I have reviewed the submission instructions for some of the 
journals I was publisher of until May.

Here is an example of an important journal which is offering a 
little more than others and a little less than some. For some 
other journal double blind reviewing is offered and it is 
explained and others explain less.

Leaving aside statements about clinical trials and about conflict 
of interests you have to go fairly deeply into the guidance for 
authors to find the following:

"3.4. Blinded Review

All manuscripts submitted to XYZ will be reviewed by two or more 
experts in the field. Papers that do not conform to the general 
aims and scope of the journal will, however, be returned 
immediately without review. XYZ uses single blinded review. The 
names of the reviewers will thus not be disclosed to the author 
submitting a paper.

3.5. Suggest a Reviewer

XYZ attempts to keep the review process as short as possible to 
enable rapid publication of new scientific data. In order to 
facilitate this process, please suggest the name and current 
email address of one potential international reviewer whom you 
consider capable of reviewing your manuscript. In addition to 
your choice the editor will choose one or two reviewers as well"

I would suggest that this sort of information is about all you 
would normally get and indeed more in some ways. There are of 
course journals which are very helpful in this respect 
particularly very major biomedical journals which are in a 
special category.

If potential authors wanted more, for example about the criteria 
used for the refereeing process and about how decisions are made 
by editors, they would press for this or only submit to those 
which give more detail. I do not think they do press and (in the 
case of XYZ) they are likely to want to be published by a journal 
like this one because it is ranked first in its subject field.

Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of David Prosser
Sent: 15 February 2011 19:11
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: SAGE rolls out rewards program for all journal reviewers

Anthony Watkinson wrote:

As far as openness is concerned some journals do explain how they
do peer review in some detail and others do not. Again it depends
usually on what the editors want or will allow publishers to
disclose.

--> Are there really Editors out there who forbid publishers from
describing the peer review process?  There can't be many
industries in which the owners of a product are not allow to tell
customers how that product is made.

Perhaps there should be an additional demand for openness.  This
time from subscribers - shouldn't customers have a right to know
the quality of what they are buying, what standards the product
has met?

David