Many to One

5:30 AM |

Tyler Cowen posted an interesting thought on his blog Marginal Revolution:

The Back-up Plan

The journals of the American Economic Association have started an experiment that acknowledges the reality that papers move from one publication to another -- and the system could save authors considerable time, and publications money. In the experiment, authors of papers that are rejected from the flagship journal -- American Economic Review -- can now opt to have referee reports sent directly to one of four other journals published by the association.

So far it looks like a near-Pareto improvement. Here is more detail; by the way, editors from sociology and anthropology say that plan wouldn't work in their disciplines, though neuroscience has a reviewing consortium.

On the one hand, I like the idea that I'd only have to wait on one reviewer to hear back from several journals. On the other, I'm not sure that I want one reviewer to have that much influence over whether my paper gets accepted at multiple journals. It also seems like this system would affect the way the review reads the paper - this a a Journal A paper, this is a Journal B paper - and I don't have a good sense of whether I'd want that or not.

Which is all just to say, any thoughts about how to fix our busted system seem worth entertaining.

-- Second Suitor

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