Abstract
Numerous peer-reviewed law journals, in particular Latin-American ones, stand out for their general use of blind methods to assess the substantive quality of academic articles. Nevertheless, this traditional peer review model is considered ill (i.e. poor-quality) across disciplines due to different technical and social issues. The cause seems to be the anonymity between the actors involved. Then, open peer review models have emerged as an antidote to combat the main symptoms that the blind model presents, namely, lack of transparency during the process and absence of reviewers’ accountability. However, thus far law journals have not adopted an open system yet. Moreover, neither theoretical nor empirical research has been conducted about its potential use. This article presents an in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of both the traditional and the open identities review models in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines – in which the latter has been broadly applied. This paper compares the experience of STEM disciplines in relation to both of the methods and use the insights from this comparison to examine the legal discipline. The author specifically argues that unmasking the identities of authors and evaluators may be a suitable way to counteract only some of the flaws that the blind model has entailed in the evaluation of academic legal publications, therefore a mixed method could be a fairer alternative for current blind-peer-reviewed law journals. The author concludes by providing recommendations for further research.
Highlights
Open Peer Review for Evaluating Academic Legal Publications: The “Antidote” to an “Ill” Blind Peer Review?
This stands in sharp contrast with the ongoing debates in North-American law journals concerning the essential characteristics of student-editing and in European law journals about editorial review; the two of which are the dominant methods used in those parts of the world to evaluate the substantive quality of academic legal contributions.[2]
The question arises, what are the symptoms of the current system that suggest that it is not a suitable “tool” for the task of assessing the substantive quality of academic legal research? For the purposes of this article, I have synthesized them into two principal groups; technical and social issues, where the former is related to the transparency of the process and the latter to the person of the referee
Summary
Colleagues complaining about blind-peer-reviewed law journals, in particular about the lack of transparency of the evaluation process and the absence of accountability of the evaluators, was one of the first and common scenarios that I encountered when starting my formation as a young researcher in a Latin-American law school several years ago. No serious debate has been started about the fundamental aspects of BPR, which are the root cause behind the problems experienced with such model, let alone a discussion of the OPR method, which offers a solution This stands in sharp contrast with the ongoing debates in North-American law journals concerning the essential characteristics of student-editing and in European law journals about editorial review; the two of which (student-editing and editorial review) are the dominant methods used in those parts of the world to evaluate the substantive quality of academic legal contributions.[2]. The current article addresses this gap in the literature, by attempting to start such a debate It builds on insights from STEM disciplines and their experience in the use of OPR as an alternative method to overcome the issues that anonymity seems to entail when evaluating the substantive quality of scientific research.[3] It is important to note that this article is neither against BPR in legal publishing, nor peer reviewers nor law journals. Oxford Living Dictionaries, ‘Ill’ accessed 3 January 2018
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