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from the looking-for-references-in-all-the-wrong-places dept.
An Anonymous Coward write:
A friend from academia recently invited me to write a paper for a journal that he is guest editing. I don't write many papers (not in academia), so I figured I better look through the Author Guidelines to see what formats they would accept, etc.
Here is the Inderscience author faq page.
This one stopped me in my tracks:
Why am I asked to identify four experts?
You must identify four experts in the subject of your article, details of which will be requested during online submission. The experts must not be members of the editorial board of any Inderscience journal, must not be from your* institution, and at least two of them must be from a different country from you*.
The purpose of this request is ensure your familiarity with the latest research literature in the field and to identify suitable experts who can be added to our Experts Database and who may be asked if they are willing to review articles for Inderscience journals; we are unlikely to ask them to referee your article.
(*"you" refers to all authors of the paper)
Has anyone else been asked to identify professional friends by a journal publisher?
Needless to say, I'm not writing anything for Inderscience until this request is removed. Or maybe I'll write the paper as a favor to my friend...and provide names of experts from my field who are deceased.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Monday August 17 2015, @10:22PM
So... they're asking you to help identify peers (that you don't personally work with) who may be qualified and available to review papers similar to yours (but probably not yours). I'm pretty sure you need peers to review peer-reviewed papers. Given the number of different specialist domains a science journal may receive papers for and given that they may not have a huge staff to go around tracking down experts in every field, this seems like a logical thing to include in the submission process not only for the stated purpose (to make sure you really do know the field) but to help them expand their database of potential peer reviewers.
Maybe my paranoia-juice tank is running low this afternoon, but I'm just not quite grasping exactly what makes this controversial enough to refuse to submit a paper. If the submitter has an objection to the policy they should take it up with the editorial staff of the publication and see if they will make an exception. N'est-ce Pas?
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ