[Corpora-List] reviewers are us (was: why LREC2012 NOT blind-reviewed?)

[Stan Szpakowicz]

Michael Zock wrote:

 > True, there are many people who make a real effort to be useful, but 
there is also amazingly large proportion of reviewers who do not spend 
the time it takes to read carefully a paper and to provide the feedback 
that authors deserve, feedback on which decisions are made.

I suppose that everyone here has seen their share of poorly written 
reviews (ungrammatical reviews panning bad language are my favourite), 
but please let us all stop and reflect: *reviewers are us*. We cannot 
say that volunteers must be cut slack because they volunteer: some of 
*us* agreed, did they not, to serve. We cannot say that reviewers are a 
bad lot almost by definition: some of *us* do volunteer, after all, and 
some of those are even brilliant.

If I were a pessimist, I would say that the quality of reviewing is a 
function of the quality of the community. If we complain that reviewers 
are sloppy, tendentious, unfairly biased, nasty, shallow, doctrinaire -- 
we complain that *we* are all that.

Well, I am a realist, for what it is worth. We are not bad, but we are 
harried and rushed, and yes, some of us may occasionally not be quite 
upright. After all, the publishing racket (-:) is a field of 
competition, so someone might be tempted to "disprefer" a paper on 
collision course with theirs.

There is, I think, a way of making us feel responsible for how we 
perform this necessary duty: open peer review. I looked through dozens 
and dozens of reviews I wrote, and I cannot find any which I would not 
want to sign. Honest and conscientious reviewers do not need the 
"threat" of openness to do well. Other would feel obliged to behave. Or 
perhaps fewer people would accept invitations, but those who did would 
do a much better job.

Cheers,

Stan

--
Stan Szpakowicz, PhD, Professor
EECS, Computer Science, University of Ottawa

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