I had the great fortune of attending the World Congress of Bioethics
in December 2018 in Bengaluru, India. Besides my participation in two
panels, I also hosted – jointly with Brian Collins, our Editor at
Wiley‐Blackwell, the publisher of Developing World Bioethics – a workshop on academic
publishing. It was meant to give prospective authors an opportunity to
‘meet the Editor’ so to speak, to acquire insight in the academic
publishing enterprise, and last but not least, to ask us pretty much any
questions that they might have, in so far as they relate to the
publication processes of the journal.
There seemed to be a number of misconceptions about how peer
review operates generally, and vis a vis this journal in particular.
For instance, concerns were raised that ‘big name’ authors, or at least
senior academics, might receive preferential treatment, and the question
was asked whether such academics’ names should be added as authors to
submitted manuscripts in order to improve the manuscript's acceptance
chances.
Let me say, at the most basic, this journal is bound by the
International Council of Medical Journal Editors guidelines on
authorship.1 I would strongly encourage you to look those up and ensure that you and your co‐authors all
meet those criteria. In multi‐author submissions each of you would have
to confirm that each of you individually meets those criteria. If you
decide to add a name of someone as an author who does not meet those
standards, then you and they would have to proactively lie to us during
your submission process, because you would be asked what each of you
contributed to the paper, and how each of you met the criteria set out
in the mentioned guidelines on authorship. I would strongly discourage
you from any deception in this context.
The journal's Managing Editor, Andy F. Visser, will then
pass the received manuscript on to both of us, myself, and Debora Diniz,
the Co‐Editors of the journal, asking us for a determination on whether
the paper should be send out for external peer review or whether we
should reject it outright. The policy at this journal is that both the
Managing Editor as well as the journal's Co‐Editors are always aware of
the author(s) identities.
The Co‐Editors of the journal make then a decision on
whether or not a submitted paper is prima facie worthy of peer review.
That means that we will ascertain whether the submitted paper is within
the remit of the journal, whether the analysis seems coherent, and
whether references follow academic standards. If we think the submitted
paper does not meet those standards it will be rejected by us without
further peer review.
Once we have decided that a manuscript is worthy of external
review, each of us as Co‐Editors chooses their own preferred peer
reviewer. We do this without consulting each other, mostly in order to
avoid any undue influence on or from each other. Reviewers are typically
chosen with a view to receiving quality feed‐back with regard to the
specialist subject area of the paper in question. As Co‐Editors we might
have specialist expertise in a number of areas within bioethics, but
certainly we don't have that kind of expertise with regard to most
papers submitted to this journal. That's one of the reasons for external
review.
We communicate our choices back to the Managing Editor who
then invites our chosen reviewers to review the manuscript in question.
At that point in time the manuscript is anonymised, the reviewers have
access to the article but all author identifying information is removed.
There are other models of peer review, so why have we chosen
this model? We try to avoid influencing reviewers’ decisions by
removing author identifying information. We know today that anything
from an author's name (because it's linked to fame, notoriety, sex,
ethnicity, religion, etc) to their academic affiliation can bias
reviewers. We prefer our reviewers are not subjected to such
information, irrelevant as it is when it comes to reviewing the quality
of a particular submission. A graduate student's submission will be
treated no different than a submission by the most influential
bioethicist alive today. There are other reasons to do with the size of
our comparably small field. For instance, a junior academic might be
negatively affected if their weak submission was rejected by a reviewer
who also happens to be on an appointments committee that decides on
whether or not the author of the rejected paper should be shortlisted
for a job interview.
Equally, when we receive the reviews and pass them on to the
author(s) with our editorial decision, the reviewers’ names are
stripped off the reviews. In order to facilitate frank reviews it is
counterproductive for reviewers to know, for instance, that during the
next conference that they will be attending there will be authors who
are supremely frustrated that their reviews led to a rejection.
The system of peer review we operate ensures that reviewer
biases are reduced as much as is feasible, and it protects reviewers’
ability to provide us as Co‐Editors with frank reviews. We do think that
it also protects authors, especially authors whose content has been
rejected, from having to face their reviewers in person during the next
academic conference that they are attending. Then there is the risk that
a rejected author tries to get even with a reviewer if – by chance –
they happen to get invited to review the submission of a now‐author
turned reviewer.
To cut a long story short, we maintain a process of peer
review where neither the reviewers nor the authors know each others’
identities. The main motive for this policy is to remove biases from the
review process.
Wiley Blackwell has produced a fair number of useful tools2 that you can access if you wish to find out more about academic publishing generally, and peer review in particular.3
Also worth noting, this journal follows the procedures and
policies laid out in a series of flowcharts produced by the Committee on
Publication Ethics.4
Do keep in mind, Editors are human beings, much like you.
Mistakes can happen. Nothing should stop you from communicating your
concerns to us. We will always aim to deal promptly and transparently
with your concerns.
1) http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles‐and‐responsibilities/defining‐the‐role‐of‐authors‐and‐contributors.html
2) https://authorservices.wiley.com/author‐resources/index.html
3) https://authorservices.wiley.com/author‐resources/Journal‐Authors/submission‐peer‐review/peer‐review.html
4) https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Flowcharts
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