Your Advices for a Better Way of Publishing
Inspired by the discussion on another website, I am thinking about a new journal with the following attributes:
1. Has its own arXiv service so that submitted papers become instantly public. I can see three benefits of doing this: 1) instant copyright protection. The authors do not have to worry that somebody (or possible reviewers) might steal their ideas; 2) the community can provide some feedbacks for improvement even before the paper goes through a more "rigorous" peer review; 3) reduce the possibility of duplicating effort. Since the paper is instantly available, it should discourage those who are working on very similar ideas to either stop re-inventing the wheels or to improve on it. I know there is a general arXiv server (https://arxiv.org/). I am not sure how many in our field are using it for uploading pre-published papers or watching for new ideas. If such an arXiv service is associated with a particular journal, many of us who are interested in that journal might want to get alerts of those papers too. There is one side effect and I don't know whether it is good or bad. It will reduce the number of re-submissions, thus # of papers we need to review and publish, because if a paper, already publically available through one journal's arXiv, is not accepted for official publication, the authors will not simply resubmit to another journal without significant revision to address the deficiencies.
2. Public peer review comments and author responses and editorial correspondence. The reviewers will remain anonymous for obvious reasons. The rest of the community can comment on comments/responses/correspondence, etc after the paper is accepted and in final shape. This transparency and the community "scrutiny” can motivate the reviewers/editors/authors to be more professional and objective. This way, we retain the complete story of the paper and the peer review comments/author responses can help us understand the paper better. Since it is also open to community scrutiny after publication, it will encourage more rigorous scholarship.
3. Impact factor for individual paper based on some type of metrics (review scores, citations, comments/reviews/votes from the community, etc.)
I will greatly appreciate any of your comments/thoughts. If you know one journal with some or all of these attributes, please let me know.
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