Henry thinks that, if you a review an article for an academic journal, they should email you a copy of their letter deciding what to with the manuscript. I review lots and lots of articles and occasionally get these letters, which I always immediately delete. I guess it’s not really a bad thing when they send these emails–they’re easy enough to remove–but I certainly don’t see why it would upset someone not to be bothered by them.
I have noticed a big problem recently, though: with electronic publishing, I see fewer and fewer hardcopy journals lying around, and this removes a key way for me to keep up with what’s going on in statistics.
Andrew,
You should sign up for e-toc (via e-mail) and RSS and bundle all these in a RSS reader. I used to use Bloglines for this, but encountered a "bug/problem" lately. Since they were not responsive I swicthed to Google Reader, which is nice, but supports only RSS and not e-mail subscriptions.
A couple of times I've refereed a very bad paper, recommended against publication, and then found that the journal published the paper anyway. It's certainly their right to do this, but it also gives me reason to consider carefully whether I want to keep refereeing for that journal in the future. That's why I like to receive these emails.
These days you need to subscribe to the rss feeds for journals. I've aggregated the feeds to almost all the main stats journals (plus arxiv stats papers) here:
https://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/1535083…
I'm with Henry. When we agree to review, we become part of the editorial process, investing (often) a great deal of time in reading the paper. We should be treated as colleagues in that process. In addition, I value the feedback implied by the decision, though this is less valuable than seeing the other reviewers' comments.
You have a problem keeping up, as in you don't just browse through them as often? I find subscribing to them through my RSS reader keeps me even better informed than the print issues because it encourages me to at least read each abstract.
I usually delete them too – often I'm asked for a statistical review, and so by the time the other reviews are in, the decision has been made, and the letter written, I don't even have any memory of the article. If it was an article that I was actually interested in the substance of, I usually glance through it, but I need to reread my review to remember it.
I like to have copies lying around to, and so I subscribe to some journals so I have them lying around, as long as they are cheap. That way I can come across them by browsing, but electronic publishing has also made it much faster to get an article I want – I never inter-library loan any more, I just ask the author for a PDF, or ask someone I know who is likely to have a copy for a PDF.
A university I used to work at was considering a new campus, and they considered a 'virtual library' – that students would fill out some sort of form requesting a book or journal, and it would be delivered either same day or next day from the main library – thankfully that idea was shelved (ha ha!), because of the browsing problem.
I subscribe to journal feeds in my feed reader – the same way I would subscribe to a blog, with the minus that it's difficult to engage in a discussion about a paper. A good example of a feed is JMLR: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/jmlr.xml
I like getting the decision letter, only because I can then see the other reviews, which I always find interesting.
One of the issues that keeps coming up in academic publishing is that some of the journals have absolutely no standards (ahem – e.g. Els*vier). In my field, molecular cancer biology, some of them promote stuff shamelessly from authors on the editorial board, and others seem to let anything through to keep the monthly issue fat. I've become pretty disenchanted with the review process for very top (different reasons) journals and for very bottom tier journals. But at least there seems to be a modicum of editorial/reviewer responsibility for the reasonable top/medium journals like PNAS.
I like to get the letter; I like knowing what they decide. I can always delete it.
It seems to me that it is a basic minimum courtesy for an editor to tell you the result of your review. You took the time and effort to review an article, and you deserve to at least get that acknowledgement. If you gave someone a gift, wouldn't you like the recipient to tell you what he did with the gift? In the case of a journal, it is no secret whether the article is being published, it is just a question of whether the editor is polite enough to tell you.
Perhaps it is only because I am so junior, but I like to see what issues other reviewers did or did not agree with. In some senses, it helps calibrate my reviews in a journal and act as a source of feedback as to how I can improve my reviewing; what issues did I miss that I should have caught as a responsible reviewer?
From that point of view I really appreciate them.
Brian,
While you must consider your personal economics, esp. re: time, if all things are held constant, I certainly hope that you continue to referee for the journals to which you refer, as if they are publishing the article despite your recommendation against doing so, as you may be the sole voice preventing complete ideological entropy.