peer reviewing

[Martin Haspelmath]

A. Katz wrote:
> What can we, as a community of thinkers, do about it?
The simple answer is: defend pluralism.

If there are several different journals (conferences, employers, etc.), 
I can submit my work to the next one if I'm rejected. I think this has 
worked fairly well in the past, and it works even better nowadays, when 
it's so easy to submit to journals all over the world.

So I'm all for peer review, but with one caveat: Peer reviewers should 
help editors select the best papers, and make suggestions for how to 
improve them.

Peer reviewers (and editors) should NOT force authors to rework their 
papers. In an earlier post, someone said that "very few articles are 
publishable in their original form". I find this a very strange 
statement -- as if there were an absolute threshold of "publishability". 
All this is extremely subjective, so pluralism is absolutely vital.

I think one of the most important functions of editorial selection is 
typically underestimated: The prior self-selection by the authors. 
Authors typically send only their best work to the best journals. So 
high-quality journals tend to publish high-quality papers because they 
tend to get high-quality submissions, not because the reviewing process 
adds significantly to the quality.

So let's keep peer review, "accept" and "reject", but let's get rid of 
"revise and resubmit". The result will be much faster publication, a 
higher percentage of journal papers among linguists' publications 
(making linguistics look more respectable), and equal quality.

Martin

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Deutscher Platz 6	
D-04103 Leipzig      
Tel. (MPI) +49-341-3550 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616