Editorial: Reviewer merits and review control in an age of electronic manuscript management systems

ABSTRACT

Peer review is an important resource of scholarly communities and must be managed and nurtured carefully. Electronic manuscript management systems have begun to improve some aspects of workflow for conferences and journals but also raise issues related to reviewer roles and reputations and the control of reviews over time. Professional societies should make their policies related to reviews and reviewer histories clear to authors and reviewers, develop strategies and tools to facilitate good and timely reviews, and facilitate the training of new reviewers.

REFERENCES

• 1: Curfman, G, Morrissey, S, Annas, G., and Drazen, J. 2008. Peer review in the balance. New England J. Medicine 328, 21. 2276--2277.
• 2: Jonathan Grudin, Crossing the divide, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.11 n.1, p.1-25, March 2004 [doi>10.1145/972648.972649]
• 3: Kennedy, D. 2008. Editorial. Confidential review—or Not? Science 319, 5866, 1009.
• 4: Gary Marchionini , Tefko Saracevic , Jack Carroll , Donald Kraft , William Hersh , Josiane Mothe , Justin Zobel , Peter Hernon , Candy Schwartz, Reviewer merits, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.43 n.1, p.1-2, January 2007 [doi>10.1016/j.ipm.2006.05.012]
• 5: Marchionini, G. 2008. Rating reviewers. (Letters). Science, 319, no5868, 1335.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.4 Electronic Publishing

General Terms:
Documentation

Keywords:
Peer review, manuscript management systems