A week ago I offered readers of this blog to review a paper I had just written, as its publication process did not include any form of screening (as opposed to what is customary for articles in particle physics, which receive multiple review stages). That's not the first time for me: in the past I did the same with other articles, and usually I received good feedback. So I knew this could work.

This time, however, the response has exceeded my expectations. Besides a few shorter messages pointing at single typos or the like, I received four full reviews, all good and quite useful. The reviewers found several typos and real mistakes in the draft. Taking all of them into account took the better part of yesterday morning, and I have produced a new version of the paper, which is available here. Later I received two more reviews and I still am in the process of including the changes in the paper.

Were the reviewers perhaps motivated by the money prize I had offered for the best review by a non-HEP-insider ? I doubt it - the prize was a symbolic $10. I believe they provided their help for the same reason many of us produce content for the internet - to participate, to give a little. The internet has made all of us so much richer than we were 20 years ago, that it is really a good idea to give back something to it; and we all benefit from cooperation. Blogs, free material online, wikipedia - all these goodies are only there because this is a model that works.

Anyway this post is not about the internet. I have thanked the contributors (Michael McCracken, Alex Reinhart, Matthew Dearing, Marc Nardmann, Luigi Stanco, and Matthew West) in the Acknowledgements section of my paper, and I am now declaring a winner of the contest for the most useful review: the winner is...


Alex Reinhart



who is a statistician, and could spot several "non-sequiturs" and inaccuracies in my text, especially ones which were quite hard to discern for anybody without a statistics background. Thanks, Alex. He wins the $10 prize (I will now proceed to ask him for his paypal account name and send him the $$). However, I have to say that the most careful revision I received was the one by Michael McCracken, who however is a physicist so he did not meet the eligibility criteria... I was impressed by Michael's spotting of double spaces or superscripts in italics.


The experiment reinforces my belief that having a blog is a wonderful thing, as it gives you the opportunity to interact with a large pool of colleagues, intelligent individuals, and people interested in science (in this case). I also can see that offering something in return for a review - even just a symbolic sum as in this case, or a mention in the acknowledgements - is really the way to go. Capito, big publishers ?