Parallel Paper Submission

[Douglas Rohde]

I considered the idea of a submission pool, from which editors would 
select papers they wished to publish, but decided against suggesting it 
myself because I think it would seriously compromise the effectiveness 
of the review process.

I think most of us would agree that the review process, however painful 
for both the author and the reviewer, is nevertheless very useful for 
identifying flaws in work that should not be published and, perhaps more 
importantly, for improving good papers.

If you submitted a paper to the pool and journal A wanted to accept it 
with major (and presumably justified) revisions and journal B wanted to 
accept it with minor ones, would you spend the time to do the revisions, 
or would you just go ahead and publish it in journal B as is?

In order to attract potentially good papers, the journal editors will 
have incentive to suggest the fewest changes.  As a result, the quality 
of the published papers will diminish.

And if you were asked to write a review for a paper from the pool, how 
much effort would you put in if you knew the author may not even pay 
attention to your review and could just ignore it and publish elsewhere?

In regards to Nicholas Swindale's suggestion, I can't imagine that the 
"get your own reviewers" model could possibly work.  Would we be paying 
the reviewers as well?  How many reviews can we solicit before choosing 
the ones we want to send in?

Finally, I think the quality of the stuff coming out of Hollywood speaks 
to the viability of the movie reviewer model.  Although I do think it 
would be interesting to have a journal purely devoted to review of and 
commentary on already published work in a particular field.

Doug Rohde
Carnegie Mellon University