Revisão pelos pares (II)

Avaliação do processo de revisão pelos pares feita por R. Preston McAfee, professor do California Institute of Technology, co-editor da American Economic Review por 9 anos e editor recém-indicado de Economic Inquiry, periódico da Western Economic Association, a associação dos economistas da costa oeste dos Estados Unidos:

"Journal time to publication lags have become embarrassing. Many authors have 5 year submission-to-print stories. More insidious, in my view, is the gradual morphing of the referees from evaluators to anonymous co-authors. Referees request increasingly extensive revisions. Usually these represent improvements, but the process takes a lot of time and effort, and the end result is often worse owing to its committee-design. Authors, knowing referees will make them rewrite the paper, are sometimes sloppy with the submission. This feedback loop - submitting a sloppy paper since referees will require rewriting, combined with a need to fix all the sloppiness - has led to our current misery. Moreover, the expectation that referees will rewrite papers, combined with sloppy submissions, makes refereeing extraordinarily unpleasant. We - the efficiency-obsessed academic discipline - have the least efficient publication process".