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Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

Universities could be in conflict of interest - organizing review of competing (or worse its own) research

Just as with the established journals, organizing it isn't that influential and relevant compared to actual editorial board; and it would be likely or even expected that the board of a publication organized by some university would have just a couple members from that university and dozens of respected scientists from outside.

It's generally not considered conflict of interest, as the boards transcend single institutions and their members tend to be individuals in the stage of career where their individual reputations that matter more than the reputation of the institution they "represent".

They already are organizing conferences, which for some fields is a major way of sharing research so it wouldn’t be a problem.

Isn't the peer review process blind, anyway? University affiliation would presumably be one the scrubbed fields, no?

The process is blind, but it's fairly easy to know who the author is just due to the topic at hand. At least for specific subfields.

Agreed. Within my own field, there are less than 10 people who are presently working on the same topics as I do. Consequently, we are constantly asked to review each other’s papers, and it is pretty trivial to tell who the author is, either because of the views and interests shown in the paper, or because of language use (i.e. you can tell that the author is a native speaker of the language in which the paper was written, or from their unidiomatic skills in it you can often guess at their native language).

The hard part in this is remaining silent and pretending you don’t know anything about this, when you meet your peers at conferences.

It is not blind for most science fields (I was not aware of any that were blind before reading this. PhD in Earth Science). What fields do you know of where journals send out papers for review with the author and his/her affiliation removed?

I've seen it exactly once (in a numerical analysis journal). Authors were blacked out. This was undermined almost immediately when the authors wrote in the introduction "... following previous work of the present authors [1]...".

Even if all these clues could be effectively removed, the nature of the research work, tools used, writing style, all unambiguously indicate authorship to someone in the field. I think for this reason double-blind review is not popular.

Which is not to say that it would be great if it were possible...

Nature offers a double-blind option for peer review: https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/peer_review.html?&$N...

See the "anonymity" section.

Whether peer review is blinded depends on the field. Some of the major ML conferences like NIPS are blinded, but in general most journals are not. The reviewers see the authors and affiliations and the editors see everything.

Many fields are small enough, with infrequent enough papers, that experts will be able to tell the author from style and content alone...

Blinding is not as effective as you'd think: http://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2017/10/31/the-fractu...

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