Nature rejects double-blind peer review - how corrupt is academia?

I've reviewed a bunch of submissions to ACM Transactions on Networking, all they were all double-blind.

Usenix, on the other hand, is is "single-blind" (if you want to dignify this with a name).

It makes a huge difference. Forget about gender bias. The real problem is bias against newcomers. I was reluctant to write anything negative about well-known researchers. When you're doing a bunch of these, you don't have a whole hell of a lot of time to track down cites and evaluate experimental results. So your default is going to be, people who could kick your ass in your field are getting good reviews.

The title of this post is excessively melodramatic.

It isn't necessarily "corrupt" to reject double-blind peer review. In my experience, most scientists who are qualified to review a paper will be able to infer the name of the researcher behind it, based solely on the content.

This is particularly true in areas where software packages or novel algorithms come into play, because people tend to name their ideas for maximum recognition. It's silly to hide the name of the researcher when the paper refers to their pet algorithm a dozen times by name.

Interesting title. You indict the entire community of scientific researchers based on a single decision made by a single journal. Is your decision making process any better than theirs?

Similarly, an interesting review of a book critical of the status-quo in academia (The Access Principle, by John Willinsky):

http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/journal.html

It seems that journals (and textbook publishers) give the authors of intellectual works prestige and bragging rights in return for billions of dollars worth of intellectual property. The more valuable the intellectual property you give up, the more bragging rights you get. The entire industry reminds me of Tom Sawyer's whitewashing trick:

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html

Or is there something I not getting?

I'm concerned that the way we fund and review science has some big problems. I don't want to get into a 30,000 word essay here, but some sciences are starting to sound like echo-chambers where there is a narrative and research is supposed to support that narrative. Double-blind peer reviews should help with that, or at least try to help. But I remain skeptical that anything serious is going to be done until science completes politicizing itself somewhere in the next 2-3 decades.

There are many ways in which academia is non-transparent, but I don't think one journal rejecting double-blind reviewing is a major one. In the areas of computing in which I work not only can I guess who's written a paper (I would estimate at least 75% of the time off the top of my head, and with a little help from Google I imagine I could get well over 90%), but I can often guess who's written a review of my papers (perhaps 10-20% of the time). Computing might be an odd example - it's all I know. But I suspect that even most "broad" subjects end up breaking down into sub-areas where the participants tend to know each other pretty well.

Double-blind seems to me to be an attempt to try and cover up the much deeper flaws of "peer review". Peer review doesn't in practice mean that a peer-reviewed article is 100% correct, and that legions of scientists have honed every sentence. It means it got past the prejudices of a few reviewers, and (unless the reviewer is unusually committed) means that it didn't contain anything that screamed "obviously wrong" on a quick read through. When I get a genuinely good review (in particular if it finds a flaw in my work), I find it immensely useful, but these are sadly in the minority. IMHO the greatest reason why new-comers to the field find it hard to get papers accepted is because their ideas have a higher chance of grating against those held dear by the established people who act as reviewers; this is such a fundamental flaw in the system that fiddling with double-blind barely even counts as fiddling at the edges.

Given all this, it greatly amuses me when in North America to see products advertised as being based on peer reviewed science.

The idea of double blind review goes against the recent (almost as old as the internet actually) trend of posting everything online long before publication.

Joao Magueijo has an interesting look into this problem (specifically referring to Nature, too) in his book Faster than the Speed of Light. I read it when I was studying physics and it really intrigued me to see how difficult it is to challenge the status quo in a science that is defined by its fundamental revolutions.

Not very.