Tag Archives: publication reform

The Elsevier boycott

There is a lot of information available about this, including the petition page, the official statement explaining the petition,  the PolyMath journal publishing reform page. I won’t repeat that here. This is just a note to say that after an internal struggle, I have signed the petition. Some of the details of this publisher’s bad behaviour were new and rather shocking to me. It is clear that a new system for dissemination, archiving, and evaluation of research is needed, and this boycott looks like a necessary, though not sufficient, step.

 

A downside to double blind review

A discussion started by Daniel Lemire reminded me of this issue. I recently participated in refereeing for a CS conference using double-blind review. I noticed an issue that I have not seen mentioned before (for example in the IMS Ad Hoc committee report). Several papers were not accepted, but they had some good ideas. If I now write a paper building on these ideas, I have no idea whom to cite or credit. I suppose I could ask the programme chair to put us in contact, but of course that may not occur for a long time (especially given the speed at which I can write papers these days). Still, this seems an obvious drawback not shared by single-blind review.

A concrete suggestion for improving scientific papers

Change editorial policy so that all articles must contain a section labelled “Our contribution” that explicitly states how the paper in question improves on previous work, and why the reader should care about it. I got this idea from an article by Simon Peyton Jones but my contribution is to add the element of compulsion! It is amazing how many papers require the referee or reader to guess what the point of writing them was.