Improving Professional Conduct in Publishing

Two cases of what the author considers grave misconduct in journal reviewing led him to consider how we could improve how journals review submissions. He wanted to treat anonymous peer reviewing as a given because no reasonable reengineering of the review process seems to have proposed a workable alternative. Although all the author's data derives from personal experience, the sample is not small, amounting to around 30 rejected submissions to journals and conferences. In each case, he carefully distilled the reviewers' comments to gauge if they constituted constructive reviewing.