Well, that's a new one: did you know that #Frontiers states this about their peer review?
"When a manuscript is accepted for publication, the names of the reviewers who endorsed its publication appear on the published article, without exceptions."
(from: https://www.frontiersin.org/about/peer-review)
So this is a hard no on principle. (I'm not worried about myself but I am very much worried about retaliations towards younger and/or more vulnerable folks reviewing for them.)
The reviewing process took 11 months, and there was a 3rd reviewer (critical one) that did not want their name to be revealed. The other were ok. No problems on my side although the process took so long!
I'd say instead it's a reasonable way to publicly acknowledge a reviewer's job - at least in those cases in which you don't expect frictions with the authors.
@franco_vazza it isn't a choice; you sign up to it when you agree to review. You can trick the system in the end by saying that you don't endorse the paper to avoid your name appearing but still think it's worth publishing, but it's tricking the system. A choice looks different.
@vicgrinberg ah, ok, I was wondering otherwise how could by rev.3 remain anonymous.
idk, it's another approach to the problem...I guess as long as the deal is crystal clear since the start of the process, one can make a reasonable choice.
In #Frontiers, if you decide not to endorse the publication then your name is not listed. What you do is you "withdraw from the endorsement process". As such, your review is still available to the editors, authors, and other reviewers, but you are no longer part of the review process (and you remain anonymous).
In the Frontiers model, reviewers are not accepting/rejecting the paper, but rather endorsing/not the paper. By endorsing the paper, you are saying "I think this is worth publishing and I am willing to let my name be associated with it". By not endorsing it, you are saying "I'm not willing to tell people to read this, but if someone else wants to endorse it, that's their business."
It's a much better system than almost any of the others IMHO.
@adredish@albertcardona Frankly no, it's not better - because the review process is full of power dynamics, especially as long as big parts of the community are on non-permanent contracts.
Everything in the world is full of power dynamics. The best we can do is create systems that help alleviate their effects on our communities.
The two big problems of peer review related to power dynamics are
(1) we need to provide the opportunity to allow for anonymous criticism so that one can call out errors without fear of retribution
(2) we need to provide the opportunity for criticism and ensuring the validity of the scientific record without gatekeeping that allows powerful people to keep data they don't like out of the record.
In my view, the Frontiers system solves both of these elegantly in ways that none of the other systems do.
(1) Allowing reviewers to "withdraw" anonymously from a review ensures that the criticism remains without identifying who the negative reviewer is.
(2) Allowing anyone to endorse the paper means that if I don't like what is being said, I cannot prevent someone else from endorsing it. On the other hand, the work that I endorse has (in a very real sense) my seal of approval and people may decide to trust it more because they trust me (or not if they don't trust me :)
(3) However, because when I withdraw, I am not preventing others from endorsing it, I am not gatekeeping the work from getting published.
And, for the record, the problem of permanent contracts is a completely different one from the issues about peer review. Permanent contract is about whether people are being paid reliably enough to live. Believe me, people with permanent contracts can be shut out of scientific process too. (So we need systems to ensure that peer review provides room for anonymous criticism without retributive gatekeeping independent of whether we solve the permanent contract problem or not.)
In my observation none of the other processes really achieves the elegance of the Frontiers system.
the classic editor /reviewer system has anonymous reviews, but has serious gatekeeping issues. An editor (and reviewers) can gatekeep work they don't like out of their journal.
publishing the reviews makes it hard to do nasty gatekeeping (good), but at the same time also makes it hard to provide anonymous criticism (bad).
preprints have no gatekeeping, theoretically allowing garbage to infiltrate the scientific record. (to what extent that happens is an interesting experiment we seem to be participating in)
the new eLife system has editors gatekeeping and then providing detailed (anonymous) criticism, but, as we've seen, this doesn't preclude journalists and others from ignoring those negative comments.
@adredish@albertcardona see https://mastodon.social/@vicgrinberg/111205278130312162 - the withdrawal before endorsement is the reviewer hacking the system eg by implicit agreement with the editor that the lack of final endorsement does not imply a rejection of the paper. If this were the intended approach, the deanonymizing of the referee should be an opt in or opt out and than it may be something I would agree to.
Withdrawing before endorsement is not hacking the system. This is (and was) the original plan for Frontiers. It keeps you anonymous. It was always thus. Remember reviews in this system are not published, so withdrawing is saying "I'm not willing to endorse the paper." One has to include the author name if they agree to endorse for endorsement to be valid. Otherwise, it's not an endorsement, it's a review.
It is important to remember that this is a different system than the standard review process. Instead of the reviewer accepting or rejecting the paper, this system decides to publish the paper if and only if there are two people willing to endorse the paper with their name. The decision of whether to endorse or not is 100% a choice that you have as the reviewer.
I do agree that Frontiers could do a much better job of explaining this because a lot of reviewers think they are in the standard review process, but they are not.
For all of eLife's "trying new things", Frontiers tried a new system many years ago that (in my opinion) actually works really well and I wish the other journals would use it.
The other positive thing Frontiers did that worked very well but unfortunately never caught on was that all papers start in a field-specific journal and then if they show impact, the authors get invited to write a review/follow-up (which goes through the same endorsement review process) for a more general journal. This means that the first review can be on validity and does not confound impact with validity. Papers get published and work their way up to more and more general journals instead of first getting sent to a GlamourMag and falling down the impact factor tree for years, and thus languishing unpublished for many years.
I don't know why it never caught on. It worked very well.
@adredish@albertcardona iiieks, "that all papers start in a field-specific journal and then if they show impact, the authors get invited to write a review/follow-up"... this and the whole idea of "impact factor ladder", I think we have a very, very different idea of what constitutes a good scientific and publishing practice 😳 Possibly different fields of research but there is very much a basic difference to it, too.
@landwehr_c My field usually does not publish with them much (our main journals are society run), so it's a first time I encountered it. Also good to know about predatory behavior - I know about MDPI, but not about Frontiers.
Interesting, obligation I would not have though of! I guess different dynamics in research field? It's hard to get desk rejected in my field, so accepting is not a big thing.
@vicgrinberg In my field (political science) rejection rates in top journals are very high, and sometimes an entire carreer (e.g. whether an assistant prof is given tenure) can hinge on a publication in a top journal. So I can imagine people being hesistant to reject papers or grant applications from someone they owe their most important publication to...
What I am more afraid of is junior people being retaliated against (or just being afraid of being retaliated against) for critical reviews by senior people who are likely to be part of their next hiring or evaluation committee. We (astrophysics in general, and even more so high energy astronomy) are a small field and some egos are very large.
@vicgrinberg
I agree, that's another thing to be concerned about. So more reasons not to publish reviewer names - and not to support the Frontiers model!
@vicgrinberg Not that related, but recently listened to a horror audio book (written in 1911) which dealt with the topic, if that genre is something for you:
@vicgrinberg it's been like this for quite some time. And imho that's a good thing. And maybe we shouldn't blame-shift when the problem is the people "retaliating".
@odr_k4tana@vicgrinberg Reviewing can be a complex process - are you the kind of person who says, "Yes, go ahead and publish with major revisions" "Those revisions are not quite what I wanted but I suppose they're okay" or the kind of person who says, "Blech. Reject; too much wrong with it to fix."
The person who says "I'm willing to help you make this okay" will be the one exposed to more scrutiny / risk. This benefits the less community-minded scholars.
@robotistry@vicgrinberg I am not one kind of person. I judge research individually according to its scope, rigor, methodology and impact. There is no one size fits all approach. And besides, what does that have to do with retaliating against reviewers. Critiquing reviewer comments is a normal and also necessary thing (often people get it wrong) that I would not call retaliating. That is, if it is done in a civilized manner. "This reviewer is an idiot" would disqualify anyone from the discourse immediately. Personal attacks, bad-mouthing or career tanking is something one should be denied tenure (or employment) for, no matter their "impact".
Retaliation can take many forms, so a junior researcher may be validly concerned that publicly critiquing a senior researcher's paper with the same rigor they would use on a peer's work could lead to reduced future opportunities. It may be difficult to identify retaliation, especially if it takes the form of denied opportunities, and many people may be harmed before that senior researcher's career is affected.
@robotistry@vicgrinberg have you actually read the thing? It says:
"To guarantee the most rigorous and objective reviews, the identities of reviewers remain anonymous during the review period. When a manuscript is accepted for publication, the names of the reviewers who endorsed its publication appear on the published article, without exceptions. If a reviewer recommends rejection or withdraws during any stage of this process, their name will not be disclosed."
Note that last sentence. Your post is based on conjecture.
@odr_k4tana@vicgrinberg Absolutely - I freely admit I did not visit the link as I was speaking to the ways in which retaliation may occur rather than to the original post.
That is a very odd policy. I generally have a problem with policies that require peoples' names to be linked to their volunteer work. I expect it'll self-select for specific types of reviewers and may reduce the number of accepted publications or produce publications with no endorsers.
@robotistry@vicgrinberg that doesn't make sense to me at all. If no reviewers endorse the pub, it is likely to get rejected anyways. If everybody involved pushes it, they are (mostly anyways) part of the improvement process and should be honored for it. While there might be selection effects, I doubt those would be purely negative.
Speaking about retaliation: I doubt people would retaliate for positive reviews. And negative reviews will always remain anonymous. So I really don't see a case where such a review system would cause retaliation.
In any case, fewer publications are a good thing for science imho, considering the garbage that is put out on a yearly basis in any field.
@odr_k4tana@robotistry apologies for the directness, but this comment pretty much says that you have no idea how scientific publishing and power dynamics in academia works.
@vicgrinberg@robotistry I mean I actually am in a field that has low toxicity. I know people in natural science (was in biochem) can be really toxicity and working conditions suck. But that's not a problem submission or journals should solve. Maybe treat people like people instead. We did it. Not sure why it's still so toxic over there.
@odr_k4tana@vicgrinberg Or perhaps you are a relatively privileged person within your field and have not experienced the kinds of suppression and retaliation that others have. This is not about "working conditions," it's about how subtle disincentives and biases related to what information is shared with what people makes it more difficult for certain groups to succeed, in ways that are often invisible to them.
@odr_k4tana@robotistry rejection is not the only point that can result in retaliation - substantial critique is hard to handle for many ppl with large egos and much influence (and yes, I did read the whole thing and discuss my reasoning with the editor). And if the intention is for the reviewer to remain anonymous if they don't feel safe, there needs to be a better mechanism than shaking the system by withdrawal.
@vicgrinberg@robotistry sure, but how will they know whose critique it actually is. Usually there's 2+x reviewers. Badmouthing both? Doesn't seem like a smart strategy.
@odr_k4tana@robotistry it's super easy, you just need to know what the a person's work focus is. Your reviewers will typically have a (slightly) different focus. Have a theory and experimental reviewer as a person? Habve folks who are more specialists in X or Y? Have someone know for their in detail statistics work? Or: Have someone using British English vs American spelling? Have someone make a language mistake typical for German speakers?
@brembs I've never done anything for them before - not a publisher that is used a lot in my field (our journals are almost exclusively community run). But I should have specified that this is new to me, not new in general.
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