I don't understand this. Don't you have blind peer review?
In my discipline, most journals even have double blind peer review. I thought that's the standard.
In my discipline, most journals even have double blind peer review. I thought that's the standard.
It's fundamentally impossible because when you publish the topics are going to be in a way or another niche enough that you know all of the people working on those topics and conferences make those circles even more public.
Say that you are studying e.g. "helical peptides", which is a vague and broad term on one side, on the other one, all the people that work on specific aspects of helical peptides (say, using them to bind surfaces that are very different in polarization, e.g. batteries) know each other and blind review would add nothing really. Even when it is blind you likely know who's reviewing it most of the time.
There are topics that are of course wider.
To make a comparison with programming: imagine you're involved in an open source community with a language that is niche enough that you know most of the people involved in it (it is common for many lisp dialects).
You can likely be given a program in that language and figure out likely who wrote it due to their interests, programming or api designing, or the use of static types, or some kind of linting that you know only a handful of people use, background, etc.
With the huge difference that in case of science the circles are much smaller because you know all your peers are in academia, who of them has specific instruments (not everyone has the same lab equipment), but who doesn't also have some others, you may know that some of your peers have their niche and "main branches" of research so you figure those things much easier. Also, in those circles you also know who is involved in your "code reviews" so if you know that A and B aren't reviewing it (you know they would've told you) it can only be C, D and E, but the feedback requesting this kind of experiment could only come from "C"...
Even if you know the people in the field and you can guess the authors, double blind does not hurt. Actually, I don’t see any downside of double blind.
Actually, names are very often used to let you out of the field if you are not part of the usual family…
There are many systems we use which provide anonymity, and they always result in some form of abuse. Such as phone numbers (scam calls), Internet (cyber harassment, scams, viruses), cryptocurrency (all the scams). Any system where humans can gain advantages from abusing anonymity they do so.
I'm not an academic so maybe there are already safe guards, but from my understanding people already cut any research into as many small papers as they can. Truly double blind peer review would likely encourage this. Maybe it would also further encourage people to steal research or peer review outside of their expertise.
The benefits may outweigh the negatives, but I'm sure people will find a way to abuse it too, consciously or not.
1. If a reviewer recognizes the author without declining the review, the result cannot be worse than without blind review. A difference would only be if the names of the reviewers are also not anonymous, but this creates much worse problems and would seriously jeopardize the review process.
2. If a reviewer doesn't recognize a dupe or paper very similar to one already published, then the reviewer is not competent and the journal has a problem with the reviewer pool or reviewer selection. That is a problem in any case, and is the reason why bad quality journals exist.
3. If the reviewer is incompetent, unfair or even insulting, then the author will complain to the editorial office who will then investigate and possibly get a third reviewer. The editor in chief or area editor can see the reviewer replies, just not the names of the reviewers and authors.
4. Your point about stealing research is not an issue. The publication is not anonymous; theft will be discovered very quickly by the scientific community (which will discover it more likely than two reviewers anyway). However, I'm pretty sure many top journals also use anti-plagiarism software.
I really don't see how double blind review could be abused more than non-blind review.
Two examples from last year: * https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... * https://www.universitetsavisa.no/etikk-forskningsetikk-forsk...
How so?
For smaller papers, if the papers still stand up to review even when the research has been cut up, that seems a neutral effect at worse. It might even be seen as a benefit as each paper is more focused.
As for stealing results, the names will still be attached before the printing is done. Only the review process will be double blind. Thus any ability to detect stolen research will still occur.
On the one hand are famous scientists who have wide influence, on the other hand are small academic circles working on obscure, niche topics where everyone knows each other so well that blind review is impractical.
How can one scientist be both so reknowned that their name tilts the balance of grant money unfairly away from other less known researchers, and at the same time their research is so specific that only a very few others can even comment on their work?
An analogy may be how heavy readers can immediately tell which author of their particular topic area they are reading, based on a short excerpt. It is what makes alternative noms de plumes almost impossible, especially now with systematic and documenting AI.
Even some Ivy League universities are now requiring blinded applications for faculty positions and they have double-blind reviews to avoid bias, e.g. hiring a graduate from Oxford instead of no-name university.
If I walk two corridors over - still in my department, but just a slightly different aspect of the field - they won't even recognize the name.
Often the arXiv upload will be right around the time of a conference deadline in fact. For these people I see no problem with an OpenReview-esque setup where the arXiv page remains anonymous until the authors opt to reveal themselves.
If people don't care for true double blind review then they should stop pretending they do. Conferences like ICLR and NeurIPS are far from blind. It would be one thing if it were just a matter of trusting reviewers to not Google the paper title, but it goes beyond that. There are currently no restrictions on the use of social media to advertise works under review nor on the timing of arXiv uploads, which can trigger alerts to those in the field right around review time.