Parallel Paper Submission: Separate Refereeing and Editorial processes

[Michael J. Lyons]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Grace Wahba wrote:

> There is a downside to the idea below: If everyone submitted their
> paper to five journals in the hopes of maximizing its
> acceptance by at least one, this will mean multiplying the amount of 
> refereeing work to be done by up to a factor of 5. Furthermore
> if an author gets an early acceptance from their 
> second favorite journal and decides to wait to see if 
> their first favorite journal will take it, then the 
> second favorite journal has their publication schedule 
> messed up. Editors and reviewers do not have unlimited free
> resources to deal with this ... S & S - suggest you bounce this 
> idea off a few editors, as well as  people who are maxxed out 
> on refereeing, and see what kind of flack bounces back. 

It's already not unusual to be asked to review a paper that has been
rejected by one journal a second time for another journal. 

Perhaps a way around this is a complete revision of the publishing model.
For example, the reviewing and editorial processes could be separated such
that a paper is only reviewed by 2 or 3 referees by a system independent
of the editorial process. Maybe referee selection can be partially
automated using something like the Citeseer system. 

Then journal Editors could bid competitively on the pool of reviewed
papers.

This is just a suggestion, there could be many other possible models of
the peer-review publishing process. Is there anything sacred (or optimal)
about the system that is currently in place?

Cheers,

- Michael Lyons

--
Michael J. Lyons, PhD
Senior Researcher
ATR Media Information Science
Kyoto, Japan
http://www.mic.atr.co.jp/~mlyons