It occurs to me that open review could also reduce the amount of reviewer person-hours that are spent on any given manuscript. If your article is accepted by the 4th journal that you submit it to, it probably had 8 or more reviewers spending time on it. If all reviews were open, the second editor could already have used the reviews from the first journal to form an opinion about the manuscript (and whether it's being treated appropriately). Some publishers ask reviewers "Is it OK if we send your review to the editor in the event that the authors resubmit to another of our journals", but this shouldn't be limited to each publisher's domain.

Thanks!

What to do when there are two works by the same author, but with different initials listed (for example, because one of the articles omitted the author's middle initial?) Brown, N. (2013). Title. Journal, pages Brown, N. J. L. (2014). Another title. Journal, pages. Do I need to refer to "(N. J. L. Brown, 2014)"? I think I read somewhere that this is not needed if the two authors are the same person (although of course in the general case demonstrating that could be tricky...)

I have a modest proposal (although I appreciate the risks of "writing by committee", and/or having someone else tweak one's great ideas). At the end of the third paragraph, after "Similarly, I will recognize as valuable...", I would add something like this: "To this end, I will respond in a timely manner to good-faith enquiries about my research, to the full extent that is necessary to establish the truth of the matter. If asked, I will defend before my peers any decision not to respond to any particular inquiry." The first part is there because, unlike the criminal justice system (I would totally defend a researcher's right not to answer questions in court if accused of, say, grant fraud), I don't think there is a right to remain silent in science. If you publish an article, I would argue that you are making a moral commitment to providing essentially unlimited after-sales service on it to your peers. The last bit is worded as it is because, while there are some time-wasters out there, it can be tempting to hide behind vague claims of inappropriate behaviour, stalking, cyber-bullying, etc. If I refuse to respond to Troll X then I should, as a minimum, be prepared to publish their unreasonable demand and show why I think it is unreasonable (and if the harassment is criminal in nature, I should show what remedial action I have taken). Simply mentioning second-hand anecdotes about "chilling attacks" does not seem to me to be appropriate behaviour for a scientist.

It's interesting that Anonymous (comment above) interprets the analogy with the journal, not the researcher, in the role of the used car dealer. It would appear that there is scope for discussion here. I'm reminded of a joke from the IT industry that was being passed round offices 30 years ago in the form of grainy photocopies (that was how office humour circulated back then) that probably dated back many more years: "What's the difference between a used car salesman [sic, this was the 70s] and a computer salesman? The used car salesman knows when he's lying to you"

Genuine question: How do we square blinding of authors' identities with a culture of preprints? In many subfields, there's a good chance that the reviewers may already have read the manuscript at the preprint stage.

A limitation of withholding the authors' identity from the reviewers is that the reviewers, being human, will typically attempt to work out the authors' identities anyway. Although this process is inherently imperfect, it's quite easy to combine an 80% certainty (e.g., from looking at who is most cited in the references section) with 20% of good old-fashioned bias and process to review the article in the "knowledge" that the author is X, with whatever implications that might have for one's opinions of the quality of the work. Of course, this shouldn't happen, but as long as reviewers are human, it will, in too many cases.

>that's why i'm surprised whenever i hear people >say that researchers do replications in order >to get an 'easy' publication. I would argue that the history of the resistance to change by those in positions of power shows that "inventing something spurious that sounds vaguely plausible and will cause waverers to have second thoughts about whether this change is really such a good idea" is a popular technique. In this case, have a look at who the people are who are saying this, and consider whether they might just have an interest in things remaining the way they are.