Some journals ask reviewers not to reveal themselves. A review process in which the reviewers are anonymous, unless they choose not to be, makes sense. But why shouldn’t reviewers be free to reveal themselves if they wish?<\/p>\n
Twice, I have received non-anonymous reviews. In both cases, receiving the non-anonymous review was a thrill. Both reviewers were researchers I highly respected, and their positive opinion of my work meant a lot to me. In one case, the reviewer asked the journal editors to forward a signed review. In the other case, the reviewer sent me e-mail directly with the review attached. That review, while positive, had many excellent suggestions for revisions. Receiving the review more than a month prior to receiving the packet of reviews from the journal enabled us to get a head start on revising the paper, which was the reviewer’s stated reason for sending it to us directly.<\/p>\n
I do not know<\/em> why some journals prohibit reviewers from revealing their identities. I can think of a number of reasons, but none that outweigh the possible benefits, such as community building, that allowing reviewers to choose to review non-anonymously supports. Thoughts anyone?<\/p>\n On a related note, who owns the copyright to a review? This question came up recently<\/a> when, according to the authors of a paper, the arXiv refused to allow uploading of a paper because it contained reviews for which the authors did not have the copyright. Is it true that a reviewer has sole ownership of the review, or does the receiver of the review also have the right to publish it? If not, how much of a review can an author post on a site like My Review Sucks<\/a>? Also, if the copyright is retained exclusively by the reviewer, that creates many orphaned works<\/a>, since the anonymity of most reviews means it is difficult to find the copyright owner to obtain permission to publish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some journals ask reviewers not to reveal themselves. A review process in which the reviewers are anonymous, unless they choose not to be, makes sense. But why shouldn’t reviewers be free to reveal themselves if they wish? Twice, I have received non-anonymous reviews. In both cases, receiving the non-anonymous review was a thrill. Both reviewers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[101,227,228,226,225,224],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4325"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4325"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4334,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4325\/revisions\/4334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}