Hacker News Reader

Comment by spekcular | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that the journal is attempting to be double blind [0], but I think in practice that's impossible.

Essentially every piece of mathematics research that is later published is first put on the arxiv in pre-print form. Most mathematicians subscribe to the daily arxiv email updates for their subfield and will take notice of any paper close to their work – and the identities of the authors. It is exactly these closely related works that mathematicians are usually asked to referee (precisely in virtue of their expertise). So I would guess that the blinding is not very effective.

[0] https://escholarship.org/uc/combinatorial_theory/authorGuide...

View on HN

I think the point here is to prevent first-impression bias from emerging before the referee had time to at least skim the paper. So instead of thinking "this author is known for boring papers; I'm outta this" or "this author's papers have always been rare and deep; I'll really give this one a chance", you first give the paper a fresh look.

I would expect double blind journals require that you have not distributed the preprint publicly.

This journal explicitly allows posting submissions to arxiv.

This could be done after submitting to the journal though, to allow double blind reviews.

It’s still common practice to place the pre-print online, either before or during article submission. Journals and conferences usually ask the reviewers to not explicitly look up the paper online. (Honor code. Usually works, sometimes doesn’t, but definitely does seem to decrease the amount of silly bashing that sometimes happens when authors are clearly known.)

Indeed. The whole system relies on trust.

In computer science, it's usual to know who is writing because the specific field is small and you basically know who is working on what anyway. I guess it's even more so in math.

You'd better not piss off anyone in your community.

I agree, and I hope to see more fully open review approaches in the future, where everyone who is interested can see the reviews and the reviewers' names. The Journal of Open Source Software has this: https://joss.theoj.org/. It's certainly not a high-profile journal, yet, but it starts getting contributions from strong researchers. Considering that in small communities, it is not uncommon that even the author can infer who the reviewer is, anyway, I think this is the way to go.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com