Online Drafts and Blind-review

Over at Certain Doubts,there is a discussion on how online drafts of papers do, or could, undermine the blind-review process and perhaps harm one's chance of getting published.  The thread can be found here.  It seems to me that many of the folks involved in the free will and moral responsibility literatures post such drafts.  So I'm wondering what Gardeners think about this question.  I think it would be better to comment at CD to keep all the comments together, but I'm not going to close comments here.

Comments

[RICHARD DOUBLE]

COMPLETE BLIND-REVIEW strikes me as desirable, but clearly overridden by the value of prepublication blogging. For example, GFP both reveals and fosters the energy, zeal, and tremendous competence of free will enthusiasts. It also gives the term ‘community of scholars’ a more plausible reference than it had 15 years ago.

Richard Double

[Kip Werking]

As a young philosopher whose lack of a Ph.d and publications would most hurt him in a non-blind review context, I especially prize blind review. And I often worry about posting my articles online, but I agree with Professor Double that the pros outweigh the cons.

I would like to think that any reviewer, for whom the blind review had been compromised by online publication, would be honor-bound to decline the review. And I would hope that they would do this despite whatever pressures there are for them to persevere (these might be greater or small, I don't know much about running a journal, and certainly not as much as Professor Double). But this raises the worry that online publication compromises so many reviewers, that doing so unfairly burdens journals, and that journals should therefore regard online publication as a waiver of the blind review right. As of now, however, I suspect that there are 10 good reviewers for each one that has been compromised by my online presence.

Another problem is that a savvy reviewer can compromise the blind review process just by being familiar with the author's view, earlier publications, and even their blog posts. Again, I hope they would be honor bound to decline the review, but I appreciate the burden this puts on journals to find a non-compromised reviewers.