Editorial for Publications March 2016

Welcome to the latest issue of Publications, a journal for studies and opinion on all aspects of scholarly publishing and communication. A specific welcome from me too, as the new Editor-in-Chief. Our journal is fully “peer reviewed” or “refereed”. These expressions are synonymous although, despite modest research, I’ve not discovered the origin of the word “referee” in this context—if any of you know or think you know, do tell me ([email protected]). In the publishing houses within which I’ve worked, we’ve always called them “referees” and had “referee databases”. But “peer review” is certainly more fashionable, and descriptive. In any event, I just wanted to say a word or two about it. Feeling quite active again in publishing as a non-exec “Board Manager” for the American Institute of Physics Publishing, over the last year or so I’ve, once more, got out of the way of keeping up with general literature and discussion on such topics (I left the editorship of Learned Publishing at the end of 2014). So it was with mixed emotions that I read the interview with Jeffrey Beall on the Scholarly Kitchen [1] and the, in fact, more interesting following comments and discussion (despite the somewhat patronizing tone of some of them). On the one hand, I was pleased that I’ve not missed anything—nothing has changed in that discussion. But I also found all those all tired (even if correct) arguments a little depressing. What stops us moving on? Mustering considerable hubris, I think I know. The problem is that almost all the comments are correct, in one way or another, they are just not sufficiently correct. They are often, if not orthogonal, then tangential to each other—and they all seem to miss, even if some of the authors implicitly know, a few points about the whole system. Of course, now here comes the wisdom to put them all straight. There are a few misunderstandings about peer review that are somehow perpetuated even when the perpetrators know or should know better. Two important ones are: