I'm still stuck on the response that I got from a very prestigious journal in my field this week. The reviewer was kind and respectful, said many complimentary things about the article, and had obviously read it very carefully and provided a detailed analysis. However, several things bothered me.
For one, blind review seems to be a thing of the past. My article was reviewed by somebody who initially received the article and knew who I was. The practice of assigning several reviewers to an article is also dead and gone. I published in this journal several years ago when they still had blind review and three different independent reviewers. Now, nobody is even trying to pretend that the process is in any way objective.
The person who reviewed my article is an esteemed scholar, and I found his feedback useful. However, this is not what academic publishing should be like. It shouldn't be up to a single person who is familiar with the author's name and credentials to decide whether the article is accepted for publication. It shouldn't be about whether that single reviewer agrees with the author. If the only people who get published are the ones this sole reviewer agrees with, the discipline's future looks drab.
Nothing is more discouraging to me than to observe this rapid erosion of scholarly standards.
