The Scholastica model is fascinating (parts of it remind me of sites for musicians), but I do wonder what their economic model is, if they’re planning to make it a for-profit venture down the road or have an IPO — their blog says “it’s a labor of love” but I bet Starbuck’s site says that somewhere too.

The social-networky side of it also seems skewed to the perspective of junior scholars. While it’s great if you want to build reputation, given my existing reviewing and editing load (not to mention students, postdocs, friends, etc), there are very few situations in which I would approach a journal editor and ask for more articles to review and I doubt I would want to have a reviewer profile on such a site.

The more I think about it, though, the more I believe that what I want both as an author and as a reviewer is not full name disclosure so much as a way to communicate about the content of a review after it’s been written. When a reviewer seems to misunderstand a point I made, what I want the most is not to know who that reviewer is, but an opportunity to ask where things went wrong – was my writing unclear, was it something else? When the abovementioned friend was going on about my anonymous comments, all I wanted was a chance to talk about this interesting paper and help in ways that would go beyond shouting my opinion at her from a safe distance and not giving her an opportunity for discussion.

Reviewers shouldn’t be obliged to answer endless requests for clarification, of course, but a chance for an author to ask one or two questions could be incredibly helpful. And maybe reviewers also want to poke more at texts they find really intriguing. I can’t quite decide if that kind of communication would work best if it were done with real names attached at every stage, though.

Scholastica’s proposed system for rewarding quality reviewers sounds interesting, too. http://scholasticahq.com/

You meant they don’t already assume the reviewers are hawking their own books? I don’t know enough to say about about genre theory in TV studies, but at this point when I review stuff on sound, media history, or new media studies (or whatever other field they think I have expertise in for reviewing), I can almost always point them to other people besides me who make points I want to make. If they ARE reinventing the wheel, then it’s fair game, so long as you make clear what arguments have already been made.

The manuscript was flawed in a number of ways, but one of the main problems was a weak literature review about one of the main facets of the topic (television genre theory). It so happens that I published a book about that very topic, and some of the ideas the manuscript presented as original approaches were pretty close to my own as published in that now 7-year-old book (which was not in their bibliography). In my anonymous review, I pointed this out as one of the crucial gaps in the manuscript, mentioning my book as well as a few other key works that could help develop their argument. But had I signed the review, I fear the author could have dismissed my criticism as sour grapes for being left out of a bibliography (or worse, simple defensive turf-protecting) rather than a substantial critique – after all, it’s easier to deflect criticism onto a perceived personal failing of the critic than owning up to your own flaws. And while the author might have been able to deduce it was me, at least my anonymity should have at least forced them to consider the critiques.

So, thoughts? Is the nobility of shifting the peer review process away from anonymity worth the dangers of authors assuming the worst about the reviews (& reviewers)?