Peer review is the gold standard for scientific work. Some people argue that the fact that an article has been peer-reviewed is what makes it scientific. I would not go that far. In my opinion, research is scientific because it is conducted according to scientific standards, not because someone else has read it. However, having peers review your work is a quality mechanism that ensures that others agree that those scientific standards have been met....
At RITMO, we have several different disciplines working together. The three core disciplines at RITMO are musicology, psychology, and informatics. In addition, we have people working in philosophy, physics, computer science, biology, dance studies, and so on. This also means that we have several different publication cultures. In this blog post, I will reflect on the differences between them. The Paper Proceedings Culture My professorship is in music technology. I don’t know if music technology should be considered a discipline; it might be better described as a community of communities....
This blog post is written to have a URL to send to Elsevier editors that ask me to review for their journals. I have declined to review for Elsevier journals for at least a decade, but usually haven’t given an explanation. Now I will start doing it alongside my decline. My decision is based on a fundamental flaw in today’s commercial journal publishing ecosystem. This is effectively summarized by Scott Aaronson, in an analogy in his Review of The Access Principle by John Willinsky...
Novelty is often highlighted as the most important criterion for getting research funding. That a manuscript is novel is also a major concern for many conference/journal reviewers. While novelty may be good in some contexts, I find it more important that research is solid. I started thinking about novelty versus solidity when I read through the (excellent) blog posts about the ISMIR 2021 Reviewing Experience. These blog posts deal with many topics, but the question about novelty caught my attention....
Many journals, and a few conferences, operate with a so called “double blind” peer review policy. This means that the reviewers of the paper won’t get to know the identity of the author(s), and the author(s) won’t get to know the identity of the reviewer. The idea is that everyone should get a similar and unbiased review. In my experience, though, both as a reviewer and author, I have found this to be quite puzzling....