[Bug-gnupedia]blind reviews

[Tom Tollenaere]

Dries van Oosten wrote:

> For that reason I do like the 'blind' review concept: that's
> what scientific journals do too..

> I have some first hand experience with that, that is, I'm waiting for a
> referee report as we speak and I can tell you that it is not an ideal
> situation. The good thing about a blind review is that I don't know who
> reviews me, so I can't take revenche by stopping his article the next
> time. The blindness only goes one way however. The reviewers knows who
> wrote it. That's a bit unfair. Also, when you disagree with a reviewer, it
> takes the editors a lot of time to mediate, because there cannot be direct
> contact between the author and the referee. Since we all have day time
> jobs, time is something we do not have *grin*.

Actually, I've done a stint as co-editor for a journal.  We sent out articles
to referees, and we blinded the names of the authors and that seemed to work
well.   So I agree that blind review should go both ways.  

We do have to find a way to prevent discussions about what/whatnot, and things 
should move reasonably fast.  What about setting up a pool of blinded and 
to-be-reviewed
articles?  Anybody (or anybody registered, should we want to go that way) could 
take stuff from the pool and review it.  Get a good review, it gets published, 
get a bad review it either gets published or stays in the pool until it gets 
either too many bad reviews and get booted, or gets enough reviews to get 
published?  

I would say that good reviews should balance bad ones... what I don't like 
might be what you like - if there is enough consensus to 'like' something then 
I should not have the right to boot something for reasons of dislike...

We *are* getting into difficult territory here - I hope we all realize that no 
system is ever going to be perfect, or abuse-free....