Peer Review Moving Toward Law Review Model?

The new editor of Economic Inquiry just sent out a missive declaring:

More insidious, in my view, is the gradual morphing of the referees from evaluators to anonymous co-authors. Referees request increasingly extensive revisions. Usually these represent improvements, but the process takes a lot of time and effort, and the end result is often worse owing to its committee-design. Authors, knowing referees will make them rewrite the paper, are sometimes sloppy with the submission. This feedback loop - submitting a sloppy paper since referees will require rewriting combined with a need to fix all the sloppiness - has led to our current misery.  . . .

The system is broken.  Consequently, Economic Inquiry is starting an experiment. In this experiment, an author can submit under a 'no revisions' policy. This policy means exactly what it says: if you submit under no revisions, I (or the co-editor) will either accept or reject. What will not happen is a request for a revision.I will ask referees: 'is it better for Economic Inquiry to publish the paper as is, versus reject it, and why or why not?' This policy returns referees to their role of evaluator.

Comments

[Jeff Yates]

I'm led to wonder how often peer reviewers (who are used to having authors toil on extended revisions responsive to their suggestions) are going to grant a pure "accept" under the new system. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

I agree with David Stras. Experimentation with these things (especially something as important to the production of scientific consensus knowledge as peer review) is very good.

[David Stras]

That is quite interesting. I am curious to see how the experiment works for the journal. I know that the length of time for publication, including revisions, can be a real pain (especially for untenureds) for some of our colleagues in the sciences.