a case for single-blind review

(Cross posted from here)
When i was in grad school, at one of the academic meetings i regularly participate in, it became regular fare for 2 particular folks in my circles to engage in a prolonged debate about how we should overhaul the academic publishing system. This was so regular (i recall them having portions of this debate for 3 consecutive years over dinner) that the grad students in the bunch thought of this as a grenade in our back pockets we could toss into the fray if ever conversations took an unwelcome turn to the boring. I bring this up because there are lots of aspects of this process that i have quite a few thoughts on, but have never really formalized them too much more than is required for such elongated dinner conversations. And one particular aspect of that was raised on Facebook yesterday by a colleague – asking about the merits of single blind review. I started my answer there, but wanted to engage this a little more fully. So, i’m going to start a series of posts (not sure how many there will be at this point) on the publication/review process here, that i think could be interesting discussions. I hope others will chime in with opinions, questions, etc. These posts will likely be slightly longer than typical fare around here. I expect that some of my thoughts on these will be much more formulated than others.

So, let’s start with a case for single blind review. I think think there are quite a few merits to single blind review (for a few other takes, see here and here). I won’t presume to cover them all here, but i will get a start. Feel free to add others, or tell me i’m completely off my rocker in the comments.

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