In praise of the referee (2)

Following Nicolas’ guest-post on this ‘Og, plus Andrew’s and mine’s, we took advantage of Kerrie Mengersen visiting Paris to write a common piece on the future of the refereeing system and on our proposals to improve it from within. Rather than tearing the whole thing down. In particular, one idea is to make writing referees’ reports part of the academic vitas, by turning them into discussions of published papers. Another one is to achieve some training of referees, by setting refereeing codes and more formalised steps. Yet another one is to federate reports rather than repeating the process one journal at a time for the unlucky ones… The resulting paper has now appeared on arXiv and has just been submitted (I am rather uncertain about the publication chances of this paper, given it is an opinion column, rather than a research paper…! It has already been rejected once, twice, three five times!)