a double-blind peer review process for manuscripts means that neither the author or reviewer are revealed to each other. most of the journals to which i’ve submitted manuscripts have this kind of review. there’s good support for this double-blind peer review, especially related to gender equality in publishing. the concept is positive and it’s something i’m in favor of. the practical problem for the effectiveness of this in librarianship, however, is that the anonymity aspect doesn’t work. the area i research and write about, electronic resources, has a small circle of experts. we all read each others publications. this becomes a problem at the point of a manuscript review because i can assume that a good editor will also know these experts and send my manuscripts to them for comment. in the last two reviews i’ve easily been able to determine the identity of the reviewers. in fact, i wasn’t even trying to figure out who the reviewers were, but based on their comments it was obvious. it was probably also obvious to the reviewers who i am as a writer.
how does this affect the final version of our manuscripts? what do you think?
