Peer Reviewing in Evolutionary Computing

Just how fair and objective is the reviewing process for conferences and journals? Peer reviewing has been the subject of study, particularly in the medical field. Are these findings of relevance in evolutionary computing?

Some issues are:

Bias in reviewing

Does it exist? What form does it take? How can the process be made fairer?

Gender Bias

Bias by country.

Bias due to contact.

Blinding of author.

Blinding of reviewer.

Negative and Neutral Results

How do negative findings get a fair hearing?

What about neutral results? When should they be reported?

Possible Ways of Improving the Reviewing Process

Double-blind reviewing.

Total openness.

Using Cochrane protocols.

Including peer reviewing by others (consumer and patient reviewing has been successfully used in Medicine).

Pre-registration of experiments.