Tuesday, 10 September 2019

peer review - Is there anything that has been tried to stop publication shopping


I find it very annoying as a reviewer when I get asked to review a paper several times as it gets submitted to different journals/conferences or, worse still, I help send it to the reject pile only to have it published elsewhere with my comments ignored. I definitely get the impression that a small minority of authors "shop" their papers around too much, which wastes a lot of the community's time. Often these papers are completely unpublishable, but sometimes it seems the authors are just going down some list until they reach the appropriate "level", rather than submitting appropriately in the first place.


I often devise hypothetical schemes to prevent this. For example:



  1. Require authors to pay to submit.

  2. Require authors to disclose the submission history their article.

  3. Have journals/conferences publish a list of rejected articles.

  4. Calculate an acceptance ratio for authors, along the same lines as bibliometrics.

  5. Somehow publish rejected articles too, so that they cannot be published elsewhere. E.g., have a journal that accepts nearly 100% of submissions, but includes a review or rating with each article, so readers know which ones are the good articles.



Of course, these are just wild ideas, many of which are impractical and would greatly annoy authors. I'm curious to know if any such schemes have actually been tried and, if so, whether they seem to have worked. Surely, in some far-flung corner of academia, one of these ideas has been tried.


Question: Are there systems that have been tried by journals/conferences to disincentivize authors from submitting their articles to too many journals/conferences? If so, did they work?


I am only aware of one experiment along these lines: ICLR - the International Conference on Learning Representations. All submissions and all reviews are made public and they stay online even if they were rejected. I don't know what effect this system has had. I would like to hear other examples and also know if there is any evidence regarding the effect of such policies.




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