In our new "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
Do you know philosophy journals reviewed in single-anonymized or identities-visible models? Recently I saw an established philosophy journal published by Springer say in its submission guidelines that its peer review process is single anonymized.
According to the accompanying taxonomy file available at https://osf.io/we82n
Single anonymized means Reviewer masked to author, author visible to reviewer, reviewer and author visible to (decision-making) editor;
Double anonymized: Reviewer masked to author, author masked to reviewer, reviewer and author visible to (decision-making) editor;
Triple anonymized: Reviewer masked to author, author masked to reviewer, reviewer & author masked to (decision-making) editor;
All identities visible: Reviewer visible to author, author visible to reviewer, reviewer
and author visible to (decision-making) editor.
Since most philosophy journals seem to be Double or Triple anonymized, I am curious about philosophy journals reviewed in single-anonymized or identities-visible models. Do you know good philosophy journals adopt these models? What are the differences between the four models? Identities-visible model seems interesting because reviewers know that authors will know their identities, and so they tend to write the reports in much more responsible ways. But what about single-anonymized review? Reviewers know the identities of authors, but authors does not know the identities of reviewers, shall this model produce more responsible reports?
I've received many 100 to 200 word reports with very biased, or deeply disrespectful and irrelevant, or even shameless and wrong comments from philosophy journals that adopt Double or Triple anonymized review models.
Interesting questions. I was surprised to learn a number of years ago that in some scientific fields, single-anonymized review (authors' identities being visible to reviewers) is pretty much the norm. I didn't ever learn why that is exactly, but from what I gathered the results of the process did seem to be pretty biased in favor of well-placed researchers ("name" researchers at prestigious institutions/programs). Obviously, triple-anonymized review is supposed to be the best process for preventing biases like these--and I suspect most readers of the Cocoon are likely to favor triple-anonymity over the others--but as the OP notes there may be other tradeoffs.
What do readers think?
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