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Comment by pseut | Hacker News Reader

> Provide for the papers a system of transparent reviews... [snipped]

I don't think this is a technical issue. Journals make mistakes on which papers to publish all the time, even when the referees work hard and take the review seriously, so this is hard for committed people to do well.

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Sure, but reviews are not transparent, nor accessible to the public. Why not? Wouldn't it be nice to see what other people think about the article before reading it? Currently there are citations, but that's about it.

My point is only that these are cultural issues, not technological issues; I agree that it might be useful to see referee reports.

A public review of article X by reviewer Y would often be quite different than a double-blind review of the same article by the same reviewer.

There are some arguments for both approaches, but I believe that the double-blind approach is much better.

I dont know how it is in other fields, but in physics, at least, reviews are only singly blind. The reviewer knows who the author is. Even then, it is often possible to guess at the referrer based on the comments they make. Blinding the author would be nearly impossible due to the small number of workers on most specific topics. That being said, I'm not sure why journals don't at least try (which should benefit newcomers to an area).

I don't think any journal reviews attempt to be double-blind. I could be wrong, but I've never heard of it in my field. In smaller fields, even single-blind (the author not knowing the identity of the reviewer) is difficult, the other way around would be impossible.

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