Blind Review???

Yesterday I had a fat laughter at some people... establishment conservation is stronger than any meritocracy whatsoever *grin*

An association I won't name (but hey it ain't that difficult to find out) has a conference and a listserv. Just recently they "upgraded" (and widely circulated) how they changed the way they choose papers for the conference, introducting blind peer-review.

Their concept of blind, however, is pretty disconcerting.

Since I saw people posting stuff like "hey who wants to do a panel on [such and such] with me?", I wrote to the ED pointing out how that behaviour (and allowing it) may compromise the blindness of their peer-review method.

To which I am replied:

"It may be that a potential reviewer will occasionally see that, but s/he can also try to be objective (still) about a proposal, even if they think they know who is behind it. Certainly I have reviewed proposal where I was pretty sure I knew who the author was, but have tried nonetheless to be objective about the content."

Still, gentleman, this is NOT blind peer-review. Let me assure you, I come from science and I know when it was invented, why, and how it has to be done. The Academy of Management knows how to do it, perfectly.

More and more often, I find people from humanities mingling with terms in the attempt to make one thing appear something else. We might discuss on whether the peer-review should be blind or not, we can't name this way of reviewing "blind".

I guess that's why the impact factor of the association's publication is low, low, low.