Hi Cameron,

I'm somewhat late here I suppose. Weirdly enough, I printed this blogpost (I think because I was about to take a flight to somewhere), and just found the printout in my bag.

I like the point you're making about the problem with peer review after a change of journals. It has another aspect that you haven't mentioned though. It duplicates efforts. It has actually happened to me several times that a paper I rejected for publication in one journal was sent to me again by another journal. In all of these cases the authors evidently hadn't thought even for a second about my report. It was exactly the same paper. (In these cases I usually tell the editor I had already written a report for another journal, attach it, and add I think it would be fair if the authors get a different referee.)

In any case, I'm not sure whether I've mentioned this before here, but I've suggested several times already that a solution to these problems would be to decouple peer review from the journals. I'm thinking that the review process could be done by independent let's call it agency for now, that provide authors with a report (or several) for their paper. This report could then be submitted with their paper to a journal, and the editors can decide in light of the reports whether they want to publish the paper. The idea is roughly that the value of such a report depends to some extend on the reputation of the agency used.

There could be several of these agencies. I'm not sure which procedure would be the best there, so probably best to just try some. Some might do the reports anonymously, some not. Some might charge for the reports, some not. It might depend on the field which procedure works best. In some fields, double blind review might even be feasible. (In fields where people tend to know each others work well or most papers are pre-published anyway this doesn't make much sense though.) There are also some technical hurdles to this, but I'm sure they can be overcome. For example if the report goes to the author for later use, you need to have some way to identify the report with a specific version of the manuscript. And I think it would make the referee process much easier if such an agency would provide a, possibly anonymous, chat interface such that one could ask some quick clarifying questions about the manuscript.

Besides this, it isn't true that writing reports isn't acknowledged at all. There are several journals where you find "best referee of the year" rankings (or something similar). I've seen a couple of these. I think it's a nice touch. This misses out on those people though whose referee services are dispersed over many journals. Best,

B.