Re: editing journals

[Catherine Searle]

I agree that this is an important topic and something which should be addressed at a national level. 

I agree with all but one of the points Christina brings up: I strongly disagree with 

point (3) "referees should be publicly named". 

In the one instance when I refereed something openly, it was a disaster, and I will never do it again. There are a number of very good reasons to keep the refereeing process anonymous.

Catherine Searle 

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Dr. Catherine Searle
Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Physics
Wichita State University

[Vicki Powers]

I agree, I would not referee if I could not remain anonymous.

Couldn’t some of these problems be solved if the author(s) were not known to the reviewers?  I believe this is the norm

in many disciplines and the Math Monthly does reviews this way.   

Vicki

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[Christina Sormani]

I’ve put an X on the suggestion that referees should be known, as recommended by Professors Searle and Powers.  I would not want people afraid to referee a paper negatively if it deserves a negative review.   

Someone has privately sent me the suggestion that journals should have a formal method in which an author can respond to a referee addressing the faults.  While this might not help much with the “not important” it could help with a claim that a theorem is false.  (I’ve added this to the list)

Prof Powers suggestion that the author remain anonymous is impossible for research journals because people post their articles on the arxiv.  I have looked into the possibility of posting anonymously to the arxiv or even using a pseudonym and it is not allowed.  I would not recommend suggesting people avoid the arxiv as that is where most papers are read long before they are published.  Indeed some papers get many citations at that stage.   With everyone reading arxiv preprints and inviting people to give talks based upon these preprints, posting to the arxiv anonymously has huge drawbacks.  (I’ve added this to the list but put an X on it)

So now the list of suggestions is (including the above changes and a couple additional revisions in brackets):

1) decisions to reject over significance should be made within a couple months.  Later decisions to reject should only be due to error.  [made within a month]

2) obviously biased or condescending reports should not be permitted

3) referees should be publicly named.  X (many would fear to referee if not anonymous -Prof Searle and Powers)

4) editors should serve limited renewable terms [where an open search is conducted instead of simply renewing the appointment]

5) solicitations for new editors should be conducted without bias like any other job search: openly advertised with due consideration given to all applicants

6) journals that lack diversity among the editors should be reviewed for bias in the selection of editors

7) Authors of articles should be hidden from reviewers X (but posts to the arxiv are not anonymous -Prof Sormani)

8) Journals should have a formal process in which an author may challenge a review and request another referee and this new referee’s opinion should have enough weight to override the original review.

Please post your ideas here in this google group.  If you fear the fact that this group is visible to the public you may privately email your ideas to me and I will post them.

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[Smith, Martha K]

Christina and others on this list:

I regularly follow a statistics blog (since I have been for some time more involved in statistics than in mathematics). Today there was a post (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/29/lets-publish-everything/) about publishing in the social sciences. I thought it would be a good place to mention the discussion that you have started, so did so (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/29/lets-publish-everything/#comment-1050881). There have been a number of responses to it, including one (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/29/lets-publish-everything/#comment-1051035) that seems especially responsive to your concerns and how they fit into a bigger picture of problems with academic publishing practices more generally.

Martha  

Let’s publish everything. « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science - statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu I think somehow you miss that “money power and influence” *are* the incentives. That is, whatever gives you money, power, and influence is the thing that many people will want to do, and maybe more important the things that will keep you employed.

Let’s publish everything. « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science - statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu I think somehow you miss that “money power and influence” *are* the incentives. That is, whatever gives you money, power, and influence is the thing that many people will want to do, and maybe more important the things that will keep you employed.

Let’s publish everything. « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science - statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu I think somehow you miss that “money power and influence” *are* the incentives. That is, whatever gives you money, power, and influence is the thing that many people will want to do, and maybe more important the things that will keep you employed.

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Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2019 9:56:58 AM
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Subject: Re: editing journals

 

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[Christina Sormani]

Just copying one response from the stats wall Martha K Smith mentioned:

These are interesting thoughts. As a guy, I’m not quite sure how useful my thoughts will be here. Rather than addressing the gender disparity issues, let me just say that I think it would be a mistake for any solutions to be framed in an adversarial way of authors vs. reviewers. One thing to remember is that reviewers are all doing it as volunteers. In saying this, I don’t mean that reviewers are always right or even always well-intentioned—I’ve seen lots of horrible behavior from volunteer reviewers, volunteer youth baseball coaches, and all sorts of other volunteers—I just think it’s a mistake for anyone to think of reviewers as major players in the journal publication game. The key players are the authors and the editors (also the publishers, tenure committees, etc.); the reviewers are just playing a role.

With that in mind, let me comment on the six suggestions listed above:

1) decisions to reject over significance should be made within a couple months. Later decisions to reject should only be due to error.

2) obviously biased or condescending reports should not be permitted

3) referees should be publicly named

4) editors should be serve limited renewable terms

5) solicitations for new editors should be conducted without bias like any other job search: openly advertised with due consideration given to all applicants

6) journals that lack diversity among the editors should be reviewed for bias in the selection of editors

1) I don’t have a strong feeling about this one way or another, beyond thinking that all decisions should be done within a couple of months. I’d actually prefer the “publish everything as a preprint and then the journal is replaced by a recommender system” model, but then that just pushes it back one step, and the question is how fast can journals decide which already-published preprints to recommend.

2) I don’t know what to do with this one! Who decides that a review is “obviously biased or condescending”? And what does it mean, “should not be permitted”? Better would be to say that the journal editor should use his or her judgment and should not feel the need to respect the opinions of a review that he or she feels is in error or which shows poor judgment. But editors can already do that, right? I’m not so concern about bias or condescension; the real issue is content, not tone or perspective.

3) That’s fine: it’s good for referees to get credit for their work. I’d go further and make all referee reports public.

4) Yes, definitely. I think that’s already the case in most of the journals I’ve ever worked with.

5) Sure. I think at times it can be difficult to find anyone willing to take on the editor position. Open advertisement seems like a good idea for fairness and also to find more candidates for the thankless position.

6) Seems like a good idea. I’m not quite sure what is meant by “reviewed for bias” or who does the review, but it sounds like this could be helpful.

——

I responded to this as follows:

In mathematics and physics all our preprints are already published on the arxiv.  The review system for publishing in a journal takes anywhere from 6 months to three years.  By the time a paper appears in print it is likely to have many citations in papers applying the results.   Even a highly cited and applied preprint can be rejected as “unimportant” after sitting on a referee’s desk for over a year.  Referees who have a bias against an author (whether it be gender bias, national bias, subfield bias, or simply competitive bias against a rival) can and will sit on an article for as long as possible only to give it a scathing rejection without any discussion of the actual content of the paper.  It is true that referees are volunteers and many people refuse to referee a paper or give a quick negative response if the result is uninteresting.  There are only two incentives to agree to review a paper carefully: one is out of honest interest in the result and a desire to know whether it is correct or not, and the other is out of a desire to hurt the author in some way.  The first kind of referee might be hard to find but if no one is interested in the result then the paper cannot be of much importance.  Certainly once a paper has been on the arxiv for awhile then someone is likely to cite it and the editor can send the paper to that person for a review.  Indeed I am often asked to referee papers I have already read and cited.   In a perfect world there would be no biased referees but in reality, especially when the competition for funding and jobs is high and the reviews are completely anonymous, many reviews are questionable.

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[Christina Sormani]

Just copying one response from the stats wall Martha K Smith mentioned:

These are interesting thoughts. As a guy, I’m not quite sure how useful my thoughts will be here. Rather than addressing the gender disparity issues, let me just say that I think it would be a mistake for any solutions to be framed in an adversarial way of authors vs. reviewers. One thing to remember is that reviewers are all doing it as volunteers. In saying this, I don’t mean that reviewers are always right or even always well-intentioned—I’ve seen lots of horrible behavior from volunteer reviewers, volunteer youth baseball coaches, and all sorts of other volunteers—I just think it’s a mistake for anyone to think of reviewers as major players in the journal publication game. The key players are the authors and the editors (also the publishers, tenure committees, etc.); the reviewers are just playing a role.

With that in mind, let me comment on the six suggestions listed above:

1) decisions to reject over significance should be made within a couple months. Later decisions to reject should only be due to error.

2) obviously biased or condescending reports should not be permitted

3) referees should be publicly named

4) editors should be serve limited renewable terms

5) solicitations for new editors should be conducted without bias like any other job search: openly advertised with due consideration given to all applicants

6) journals that lack diversity among the editors should be reviewed for bias in the selection of editors

1) I don’t have a strong feeling about this one way or another, beyond thinking that all decisions should be done within a couple of months. I’d actually prefer the “publish everything as a preprint and then the journal is replaced by a recommender system” model, but then that just pushes it back one step, and the question is how fast can journals decide which already-published preprints to recommend.

2) I don’t know what to do with this one! Who decides that a review is “obviously biased or condescending”? And what does it mean, “should not be permitted”? Better would be to say that the journal editor should use his or her judgment and should not feel the need to respect the opinions of a review that he or she feels is in error or which shows poor judgment. But editors can already do that, right? I’m not so concern about bias or condescension; the real issue is content, not tone or perspective.

3) That’s fine: it’s good for referees to get credit for their work. I’d go further and make all referee reports public.

4) Yes, definitely. I think that’s already the case in most of the journals I’ve ever worked with.

5) Sure. I think at times it can be difficult to find anyone willing to take on the editor position. Open advertisement seems like a good idea for fairness and also to find more candidates for the thankless position.

6) Seems like a good idea. I’m not quite sure what is meant by “reviewed for bias” or who does the review, but it sounds like this could be helpful.

——

I responded to this as follows:

On May 29, 2019, at 11:07 PM, Smith, Martha K <m...@math.utexas.edu> wrote:

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[sorm...@gmail.com]

Last year we had a discussion on the editing of journals.  There were a variety of suggestions made and rejected, and I have a new thought.  What if there was a standard that says nobody should be an editor on more than three journals?   This is something that men might support as well due to the vendettas some hold against one another.   With such a restriction journals would have to look further for editors and it would become more diverse through a natural process.

What are your thoughts on this or other ideas?

Has anyone here managed to become an editor at a journal in the past year?   My experience as editor on two small journals has not gone well.

Thank you for any thoughts,

Christina

[Matilde Lalin]

Hi,

At the time of the last email (May 2019) I was starting as an editor for a small journal. Now I'm still editor for that one, added another more prominent (but still area specific) one this last summer, and I've just been invited to be editor for the new AWM journal "La Matematica".

What was helpful for me: making noise in social media and discussing this with some members of the Women in Number Theory network (my area of research).

I'm not sure about limiting the editorial boards because the various editorial experiences are very different, and this may limit progress to more impactful journals. (I'm not saying this for myself, I have my plate full right now!)

Thanks for keeping up the discussion!

Best,

Matilde

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Matilde N. Lalín

Professeure titulaire/Professor
Département de mathématiques et de statistique
Université de Montréal
CP 6128, succ. Centre-ville
Montréal, Québec, H3C 3J7, Canada

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[Judy R]

Hi, Christina. I am far removed from that world since my retirement, so please take me off this list. Great good luck. Thanks, Judy

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[eeei...@gmail.com]

Hi Christina,

I recently was invited to join the editorial board of a journal.  

I agree with Matilde about the risk of limiting progress at more impactful journals.  Also, there are so many more men than women (at least, in my field) that limiting the number of journals on which one could be an editor would not naturally lead to more diversity.  I think it would be necessary to more explicitly address diversity.

Thanks for bringing up this important topic!

Best wishes,

Ellen

E.E. Eischen

Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics
The University of Oregon
Fenton Hall, Eugene, OR 97403-1222

http://www.elleneischen.com

http://pages.uoregon.edu/eeischen/CreativityCounts/

[Sue]

I love the idea of no one being an editor on more than three journals.  My experience with my colleagues is that those who try to be an editor on more than three journals not only do a poor job on all of them, but often don't do any of the job on some.  They just want the prestige, not the work.  Having a limit would make it easier to remove non-working editors as well as force journals to look further afield, maybe even be more diverse, in their choices.  Great idea, Christina.

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