Parallel Paper Submission

[Simone G.O. Fiori (Pg)]

A problem that deserves attention deals with the interdisciplinary nature 
of connectionism, which plays a non negligible role in the determination 
of the difficulties related to the reviewing process. Connectionists come 
in fact from diverse research areas, ranging e.g. from electrical 
engineering to psychology, from neurobiology to mathematics and physics, 
and so on. This often makes papers result in a cross-fertilization of 
several research branches and, as a matter of fact, makes them difficult 
to be read from reviewers that do not possess such wide knowledge.

Published broad-area papers are interesting to the Readers as well as
specialized papers, but they may make severe difficulties arise in 
the review phase.

In my opinion, part of the delay in the review processes arises when an
Editor (or action or associate Editor) faces the problem of assigning a
paper a proper set of reviewers: It is not infrequent that, after long 
time, the people simply return the papers unreviewed reporting they are 
unable to make any useful comments or reporting some sections, e.g. 
theoretical ones, appear unaccessible. This simply means that reviewers 
are not in late wrt the review deadline, but they provide a null report.

This creates troubles to the Editors who, when this happens, usually take 
one of these two possible decisions: 1) Simply reject the paper suggesting 
the Author to submit it to another more suitable journal, or 2) Try to 
assign a new set of reviewers in the hope to have better luck, re-starting 
in fact the whole process again.

In this situation, by taking a negative decision the Editor implicitly 
assumes the Author is responsible for the bad outcome -- and this might 
be not so wrong, actually -- while the second choice burdens the Editor's 
office or the Editor him/her-self and leave the Author the feeling that 
an embarrassing, unjustified, long review time is being taken for his/her 
paper, because he/she is unaware of the difficulties the hidden people 
are encountering.

As someone else has already suggested, a possible solution to this 
problem is a semi-blind review process, where any Author can suggest a 
list of handy potential reviewers for the submitted paper; the Author 
knows they are potentially able to read and comment on the paper, and 
the longer the list an Editor can count on, the smaller the knowledge 
an Author has about to whom the paper will be actually sent for review 
to. To be realistic, I think that if we want our papers to be read by 
people that actually know the topic, the "conflict of interests" is 
intrinsic... but this is physiological to our scientific life.

About the reviewers, I don't see drawbacks in asking PhD students or
post-docs to perform reviews, provided that this is intended in the 
right way: This could be ultimately a good exercise for them -- striving 
to comment on an academic valuable paper, or to detect and comment on the 
weakness of a scientific proposal -- and a good source of high-level notes 
and observations for Authors. A pool of PhD students or post-docs (such as
room-mates) with some research experience, can sometime exceed the 
knowledge-spread and knowledge-diversity of a single person.

My last note concerns a ground-level proposal that I ask the opinion of 
colleagues on: Some conferences and journals have started managing 
submissions and reviews by email or, even better, by dedicated web-pages; 
I can report the great examples of the IEEE Trans. on Antennas and 
Propagation, the IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems - Part II, and Neural
Processing Letters, just to cite three; they allow to submit electronic 
versions of the papers and the reviews electronically, without the need of 
printing, sending stuff by snail-mail, faxing, etc. with a non-negligible 
gain of time (and postage saving, of course...). I would suggest journals 
definitely move to electronic paper submission and review.

All the best,
Simon.

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Dr Simone Fiori (EE, PhD)- Assistant Professor
Dept. of Industrial Engineering (IED)
University of Perugia (UNIPG)
Via Pentima bassa, 21 - 05100 TERNI (Italy)
eMail: sfr at unipg.it - Fax: +39 0744 492925
Web: http://www.unipg.it/~sfr/
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