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New Top Tier Science Journal Announced
Shipud writes "The Max Planck society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Wellcome Trust have announced their plans for a new journal for biomedical and life science research to be launched summer 2012. From the joint press release: 'The journal will employ an open and transparent peer review process in which papers will be accepted or rejected as rapidly as possible, generally with only one round of revisions, and with limited need for modifications or additional experiments. For transparency, reviewers' comments will be published anonymously.' The journal will be online-only and open access too, and they promise 'an opportunity to create a journal and article format that will exploit the potential of new technologies to allow for improved data presentation.' Especially valuable is the 'limited need for modifications or additional experiments,' especially since even Nature has recently published a scathing opinion piece about reviewers' almost reflexive demands for additional experiments from manuscript authors."
It's more of a double-blind thing in the review process. Helps with neutrality as neither the reputation of the submitter nor of the reviewer gets into the way. Honesty is one thing, but scientists are also human. Getting a chain of negative reviews from one person you can identify will hardly leave you in the position of neutrally reviewing them later, as hard as you may try.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
pssst... all technical journals have top reviewers that work for free. that's how the industry works. it's all part of the closed journal gimmick.