the Blind Shall See! the Question of Anonyminity in Journal Peer Review

Abstract

This involves taking on the role of "modest witness", that of a man of science unpolluted by his own subjectivity and corporeality, whose historical and political emergence was so well documented by Shapin and Schaffer (1985).In her now famous text, Haraway (1996) reconceptualized this posture by arguing for the elucidation of the material conditions of existence of subjects and objects of knowledge in as much as they are continuously traversed by language, story, corporeality and metaphor.It is in this context that we now examine the forms of arrangement developed between anonymity and objectivity in the evaluation of scientific articles.We will pay particular attention to the way in which the technologies used to decide upon the fate of manuscripts attribute distinct positions of judgement within the decision-making process.And as this story unfolds, we will see that the commitment of researchers (female scholars in particular) who feel themselves to have been hard done by is far from anecdotal.Peer review was one of several different technologies to emerge during the 17 century, notably at The Royal Society in London, for the purpose of carrying out experiments, determining the forms of participation by scientists and guaranteeing validation of the facts (Shapin & Schaffer 1985).In addition to the head of Philosophical Transactions, as from 1750 an editorial committee was also tasked with collegially examining and selecting manuscripts (Bazerman 1988, chap. 5).However, since D. Crane's cross-disciplinary study (1967), we know that the editor-in-chief was the sole decision-maker, especially when it came to refusing to publish certain manuscripts, and for a long time remained in a dominant position in numerous journals.The systematic use of outside reviewers, often named referees, is a more recent practice, essentially to add to the editor-in-chief's areas of expertise and to cope with the specialization of expertise (technique, laboratory materials) and the increasing volume of manuscripts (Burnham 1990).The fate of a manuscript nowadays depends on a series of successive judgments, the number and sequence of which varies from one journal to another.So what conditions are considered optimal for making a judgment on a manuscript?

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