[Air-L] to name reviewers or not

[Barry Wellman]

dear Prof Hechtl,

I strongly believe the opposite: instead of "more qualitative work" (I 
assume you meant "quality work", we will only get very positive reviews 
which won't be able to sort out the gold from the wheat from the chaff -- 
as few people want to get added to enemies' lists

PS: 5 reviewers/article seems an awful lot.

   Barry Wellman
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>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 12:49:26 +0200
> From: Johann H?chtl <johann.hoechtl at donau-uni.ac.at>
> To: air-l at aoir.org
> Subject: [Air-L] Add the contact details of reviewers to published,
> 	peer-reviewed papers
> Message-ID: <522B04B6.5050906 at donau-uni.ac.at>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
[snip]
>
> Sure, it is our liability to carefully select reviewers. And most of the
> time reviews are voluntary carried out in spare time. However, apart
> from these arguments justifying hasty reviews, what strikes me is the
> fact that the reviewers identities are kept in secrecy.
>
> I don't know where this habit comes from, but it must be somewhere
> deeply enshrined, as I am not aware of a style manual which describes
> where to put and how to format reviewer contact details of papers
> (though there might be such).
>
> Knowing the reviewers of papers, both the authors as well as the reader,
> has a couple of advantages:
>
> * The reviewer is more obliged to deliver qualitative work as the paper
> is under public scrutiny in respect to her / his effort put into
> reviewing the paper.
> * The reviewer is especially obliged to the authors as her / his verdict
> will have to be carefully justified.
> * These forces will increase the quality of a papers.
> * It will encourage scientific discourse
>
> Though there are also possible disadvantages:
>
> * There might be less papers published as reviews will be carried out
> with increased rigor and reviewers more tending to reject than to
> approve to avoid qualitative discussions afterwards.
>
> I for one will start to discuss this topic with our journal editors and
> gather their opinions.
>
> This is a general topic and should this be inappropriate for this
> mailing list I apologize and will put it on a blog.
>
> Regards,
>
>    Johann
>
>