Tim Crane on refereeing

I've been following some of the internet discussions about people's complaints
about journals. The recent thread on Brian Leiter's blog (http://bit.ly/dvZuC)
prompted a few thoughts. Tried to post them on the blog but for some reason it
was rejected. I didnt wan't to let this bit of structured procrastination
(http://bit.ly/LG7Z) go to waste, so ...

The Tasang & Frey paper which Chris Bertram links to
(http://www.iew.unizh.ch/wp/iewwp280.pdf) is very interesting and shows that
whatever problems there are with peer review are not unique to our discipline.
The 'accept as is' (i.e. no 'revise and re-submit') proposal in this paper is
an interesting line, and like the other proposals mentioned here should
probably be tested by some journal or other to see how it turns out.

Peer review is often held up as the gold standard for academic publication,
but it's pretty obvious that the whole process has become deeply problematic.
One thing which is rarely pointed out (though Tsang & Frey do) is that
reviewers are often completely untrained for their task: speaking for myself,
I had no idea what counted as a publishable paper when I first started
reviewing. New reviewers may have completely unrealistic standards, and they
are often inexperienced academics, since the experienced ones are too busy (or
let's face it, too world-weary or too grand) to take on this job.

'Training' for reviewers is obviously out of the question, of course. And
given the current number of journals and submission habits, journals must
continue to rely on experienced reviewers. But I think a step in the right
direction would be to put more trust/faith in the editors: the editors need
not present themselves as even-handedly taking on board everyone's opinion, as
if they were all of equal value. Editors should not feel intimidated by the
supposed gold standard of 'peer review' to pass the responsibility for
evaluation onto the reviewers. They can dismiss reviewer's comments just as
they can dismiss a paper. If you don't like editor X's decisions then there
are plenty more journals out there.

This raises another issue. A number of editors I know have commented that it
is difficult to find people to review papers. Surely this has something to do
with the increasing number of papers which are submitted, and the still
increasing number of journals. I'm sure that the recent decisions to have a
moratorium on submissions to various philosophy journals were not taken
lightly, but in conditions of considerable pressure.

Another radical suggestion which philosophy journals might want to consider,
in order to cut the number of submissions, is to charge people a fee for
submitting a paper. This might discourage people from submitting papers which
(even in their heart of hearts they themselves might admit...) are still not
quite finished, or not quite ready yet. (Of course, the journal would have to
make sure that the money did not go to the rapacious publishers and was spent
on making the journal more efficient.)

I don't imagine this would be very popular with the contributors to the thread
on Brian's blog but I thought I would mention it anyway.