A vision for new editor policy

Nowadays most journals, as long long as they have fair prestige, must have the papers published under peer review, which monitors either the technical aspects or the physical importance or both of received manuscripts. Usually, a manuscript will be at first evaluated by editors and then sent to expert referees. After some time (one or two months or even longer), reviewer's reports will arrive to the editors, who then make a decision based on the reports. It may be either rejected or asked for revisions. Even if it is rejected, the author may still have the chance to write a rebuttal if he thinks the reviewer's reports are refutable. Now the author sends the revised manuscript together with a reply to the reviewer's reports. After that the author has to wait another period to get the reviewer's second reports. And still, the reviewers may get him wrong. At this stage, the editor usually won't listen to the authors anymore and will directly deter the considerations of the manuscript.

As everybody may agree, such a procedure is time consuming and does not ensure timely, unbiased and direct communications between the referees and the authors. The referee is placed at a superior position and the author is not allowed to engage timely conversations with the referee. However, timely conversations and continuous discussions are crucial for the referees to get a thorough comprehension of the work. The point is that, any expert can make mistakes. The best peer review process should look like this: whenever the reviewer reaches a place where he feels confused, he should be able to instantly address it to the author and ask for clarifications, and the author should give a reply within certain duration of the arrival of the referee's requests; if the referee is not happy with the author's reply, he may then recommend against or he may send a further request if he thinks the issue is important enough. Anyway, the point is to render efficient communications between the author and the referee.

The above described process is possible given present technology. The reviewer should be given an email box and so should the author. These email boxes are used only for peer review process and should be transparent to the editor. All conversations and arguments are collected there.