[Air-L] open-access - a practical question

[Alex Halavais]

Nicole,

On Feb 10, 2008 4:13 PM, Nicole Ellison <nellison at msu.edu> wrote:
[...]
> Assuming some of you share these goals, how
> do we reconcile the common act of putting early-stage work online,
> either as blog posts/talk cribs (like danah) or as full papers, while
> maintaining blind peer review?
[...]

We don't. At least in our area, I think double-blind refereeing has a
pretty short future.

There is a question as to what degree something is really blind
anyway.  Even without resorting to Google, some large proportion of
the papers I see as a referee are familiar enough in style or topic
that I can guess who it is (or at least who the authors spend a lot of
time with!). This is even easier with authors who are addicted to
self-citation. Even if I haven't seen the paper presented at a
conference, blogged, or an earlier piece of the research published,
there is a good chance that I could guess the author if I really
wanted to.

Maybe this is why JASIST and some conferences use single-blind refereeing?

Alex



-- 


--
//
// This email is
// [X] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded.
// [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing.
//
// Alexander C. Halavais
// Social Architect
// http://alex.halavais.net
//