Publish-or-Perish Postscripts

I am grateful for Mohamed Gad-el-Hak’s thoughtful Opinion piece and his response to my suggestion (Physics Today, September 2004, page 11 ). However, I dispute his claim that none of the suggestions offered by readers directly address the problem of excess. My suggestion to reward referees would do just that for several reasons.

• ▸ Proper recognition of reviewing efforts would encourage each referee to be more thorough and thereby increase the likelihood of spotting and rejecting poor submissions.

• ▸ Referee recognition would also encourage journal publishers to subject each paper to a greater number of referees, because more would be willing to make themselves available. The net effect would again be to increase the opportunities for identifying poor submissions.

• ▸ The larger pool of referee volunteers would inevitably result in reduced paper output, since referees engaged in reviewing submissions have less time, and somewhat reduced motivation, to write papers of their own.

I respect Gad-el-Hak’s reluctance to accept this idea because referee anonymity could be lost. Several work-arounds spring to mind: Instead of printing the names of referees, journals could provide a standardized receipt or certificate of gratitude for each review. Alternatively, if it was decided that an authorized automatic search should be able to find all articles refereed by a particular person, a protected automatic search system could be designed wherein the names of referees would be published in encrypted form in the paper they have reviewed; keys to the encryption would then be delivered only to the referees, who could verifiably demonstrate their refereeing contributions to those parties they choose.