From: Sally Morris <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 12:09:17 +0000

Peer review by one person only is not, in my book, proper peer review -
there should be at least three independent reviewers, with the
Editor-in-Chief (or an appropriately delegated deputy) making the final
decision

Would others agree?

Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK
Email:  [log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:48:33 -0600

I've visited the web site and can find no list of the 100 reviewers anywhere
on it. There is a list of the "Editorial Team" consisting of
14 members, only two of whom are based in the U.S., one of them being the
overall "Editor," William Martin Modrow, who is a Rare Books  & Manuscripts
Librarian at Florida State, who has an MA in history and MLIS, both from
that university:
http://www.lib.fsu.edu/about/faculty/profiles/ModrowB.html--a rather odd
choice, I'd say, to be the editor of a journal covering all of the social
sciences, which are outside his listed fields of expertise.
The other U.S. scholar on the "Team" is one Monroe Friedman, an emeritus
professor of psychology at Eastern Michigan University, known mainly for his
work on consumer behavior.

Over the years as an editor in the social sciences (covering every field
except psychology) for 45 years, I have never come across the names of any
of the 14 members of this "Editorial Team." Moreover, the description of the
editorial peer-review process makes it clear that each manuscript is
assigned to one member of the "Editorial Board"
(which may or may not be different from the aforementioned "Editorial
Team") who, in most cases, do the peer review themselves and make the final
decisions, occasionally consulting with an expert not on the Board. What Mr.
Scott says about one of the key goals being speed of dissemination is hardly
reassuring about the quality of the peer-review process. He boasts that it
takes just weeks, instead of months, suggesting to me, at least, that the
reviews conducted are pretty superficial. I wonder if Mr. Scott would care
to share with us a sample reader's report on an accepted manuscript,
removing the name of the reviewer (though the site also says that the
Editorial Board members's name always appears when the article is
published)?

Sandy Thatcher



At 8:23 PM -0500 12/18/12, LIBLICENSE wrote:
> From: Dan Scott <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 09:20:16 +0000
>
> If any Liblicense members would like to know more about us, there is
> plenty of information on the website or you can read an article that
> was published recently in Insights, the journal of UKSG. To access,
> visit our homepage
> (www.socialsciencesdirectory.com) and scroll down the page below the
> main picture to follow the link.
>
> One of our key goals is dissemination - can we speed up the time to
> publication and will people then use the content? The answer to both is
Yes:
> our peer review process takes weeks, rather than months or years; and
> in the three months since publication our COUNTER-compliant statistics
> show there have been over 3,300 downloads.
>
> Dan Scott