Hello everyone,
I would like to suggest to allow authors the option to rate reviewers. There could be a brief questionnaire of maybe 3-5 rating questions and a comment box to include why the authors approved or disapproved of the reviewer's performance.
For the journals I work with, we currently have a couple questions that allow editors to rate reviewers, but there is no functionality for the authors to do this. If authors received a link in their decision letter that lead to a pop up to rate reviewers, scores could be used to have an all encompassing idea of how well the reviewer performed. The score could either show separately from the editor's rating of the reviewer or it could be combined, but I personally think two separate scores might be more beneficial. That way if an author gets a decision they do not agree with, and rates the reviewer poorly because of it, the editor could review the comments and see if the low rating was actually justified. In addition, that rating would not effect the average score given by the editors.
This could be most helpful to weed out reviewers that do not really offer a super in depth analysis of the manuscript and reviewers who maybe only focus on grammar, but do not offer critiques of the science. A lot of the time, the editors for my journals forget to rate the reviewers. So this option could help offer a bigger picture regarding whether a reviewer should be invited.
Thank you for your consideration,
Shauna
