Double Blind
epistolary peer review fiction
Readers of my previous peer review sci-fi story “Single Blind” may be interested in this new story. It’s not a sequel or set in the same universe as “Single Blind,” but it shares some formal characteristics. “Double Blind” takes the form of correspondence between a peer reviewer and the editorial office of an academic time travel studies journal.
Double Blind
from: rp
to: jc_editor
cc: ls
RE: Invitation to review submission JC2057-XXXXX
Hello [Editor],
Thank you for the invitation to referee for The Journal of Chronokinetics. It was good to see you at ChronoCon in C███████ in April—you were admirably persistent in getting me to volunteer for the Journal! I think the Boulevardiers you kept ordering me from the open bar in that General Dynamics–sponsored happy hour may have had something to do with my compliance. I always need a solid week of sober solitude to recover after a wild academic conference, especially these days. Next year I’ll bring the wife to keep me in line.
At least this was the worst thing I agreed to under the influence. I could’ve sworn I saw the GD Government Affairs rep corner the senior senator from ███████ at the bar. I’m sure they got their money’s worth in deregulatory pressure. Soon enough, chronologistics will no longer be the exclusive domain of academics like us. Did you catch that panel on “tactical chronokinetics” from those kids at Lockheed? The battlefield enters the fourth dimension…
Normally, I would be happy to serve as a referee for a paper or two. However, I am currently planning a research trip in the field and will be away from reliable telecommunications for at least six months from the Journal’s frame of reference. Additionally, I receive a high volume of referee invitations every week, though not all from such high-impact journals. Therefore I must decline the invitation, unless you find it suitable that my graduate student conduct the review in my stead. With my supervision, of course. You understand it’s important to delegate such tasks to train the next generation of scholars.
L█████ is one of my brightest students. With a little bit of encouragement, he’ll make a fine scholar one day.
Best,
R█████ P████
from: ls
to: jc_editor
cc: rp
RE: FWD: Invitation to review submission JC2057-XXXXX
Dear [Editor],
I very much appreciate the opportunity to provide a review on behalf of Prof. P████ and look forward to our future correspondence! Please be assured that I am eager to provide a fair and thorough evaluation of the assigned manuscript to the best of my abilities. I can also provide a statistical analysis if that will help! My dissertation is on the relationship between Hubble expansion and artificial time dilation in Hawking-LeGuin devices. I hope to expand on Prof. P████’s Fields Medal-winning work to some day establish a unified theoretical framework for chronokinetics as it is utilized in the field. Call me grandiose, but it’s exciting work!
Anyway, always great to read the cutting-edge literature! The abstract certainly seems to be aligned with my research interests. So cool that I get to see a paper before it’s even published! Looking forward to seeing the full manuscript!
I understand and affirm that, per the Journal’s double-blind peer review policies, I will remain anonymous to the author and the author will remain anonymous to me.
Warmest Regards,
L█████ S███████, B.S., M.Sc., M.Div.
from: ls
to: jc_editor
cc: rp
RE: FWD: Thank you for agreeing to review JC2057-XXXXX
Dear Author,
Thank you for the opportunity to read this interesting manuscript. While the paper as a whole is conceptually sound and the ideas presented are exciting and fresh, there are some troubling errors and inconsistencies. I hesitate to use the word “sloppy,” but the paper is riddled with typos. Especially consequential are the mistakes in Equations 2, 4, 5, 11, and 12.
Figures 3, 5, and 7 similarly show imprecise work, and—I regret the necessity of pointing this out—appear to be hand-drawn. I don’t even think the author scanned it, they just took a picture of it. Despite some clever cropping, I can still see the corner of the logo on the cocktail napkin for the newly-opened Bar Aleph Nought on Wells Street in C███████, which I recognize because I actually went to their soft opening just last weekend. ([Editor], please feel free to remove that last sentence if you feel it violates your reviewer anonymity policy. I was just struck by the coincidence.)
Additionally, I was confused by your Literature Review section, which seemed to reference works that I couldn’t locate. It alludes to a research history that does not align with my understanding and that I wasn’t able to verify independently. For example, you refer to a Prof. R█████ P████’s groundbreaking paper “Towards a Topology of Spacetime for the Time Travel Era,” which your Literature Review states was published in 2033 and earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2055. Much as I agree that Prof. P████ is deserving of that honor, I’m afraid that this hasn’t happened (yet), but he was awarded the Fields Medal in 2034.
In any case, the underlying ideas are quite novel and I believe they deserve to be published, but the manuscript will require extensive revision before it is suitable for publication in a journal of this stature. Please see the attached document for my detailed notes and suggested edits.
Warmly,
Reviewer 2
Confidential note to the Editor:
Dear [Editor],
I didn’t want to put this accusation in my review directly to the author, but due to the nature of the errors in the manuscript, I highly suspect that the author generated their Literature Review and References sections using a quite inferior AI model. It hallucinated a reference to my dissertation, which hasn’t been published or even submitted to my dissertation committee yet! I should have completed it two years ago, but as it turns out, my mother was involved in a freak ski accident on Olympus Mons and I had to suspend my PhD program to be her caretaker during a lengthy recovery period. So my thesis should have been published, if not for that. Plus some time I took off for personal stuff. Nothing serious. Stress. Just getting my head right before diving back into my thesis work.
But it is strange that the author used an early draft of the title. I don’t remember making that publicly available anywhere. I must be posting too much on the Stack Exchange blockchain forum—mostly just commiserating with other grad students. I haven’t been sleeping well, lately, so maybe I’m just forgetting something.
Anyway, obviously the use of generative AI is not prima facie against the Journal’s policies, but the fact that it was such a poor output made me want to flag it for editorial review. Please let me know if this is inappropriate or out of line in any way! I hope I’m not getting out ahead of my skis, like my mom did! Ha ha.
Warmest regards,
L█████ S███████, B.S., M.Sc., M.Div.
from: ls
to: jc_editor
RE: FWD: Thank you for agreeing to review JC2057-XXXXXR1
Dear Author,
Thank you once again for the opportunity to review your revised submission. I appreciate your responsiveness to my suggested changes and believe that the manuscript is much improved. However, I still have some concerns remaining before I would recommend publication. Please see my detailed comments and line edits, attached.
Best,
Reviewer 2
Confidential note to the Editor:
While I stand by my earlier assessment that this paper contains at least three important advances, I remain troubled by the presentation. What I’m going to tell you might sound a little crazy. I would like your assurance that my comments will NOT be shared with the author. I know this little box I’m typing into says ‘confidential’ but I just want to make it really super duper clear that this is for THE EDITOR’S EYES ONLY.
Okay. So. I was looking back over the original submission and, I don’t want to sound paranoid, but it really is like the author has been reading my private, unpublished notes. The ways in which the argument develops in the manuscript, the phrasing, even some of the errors in the equations that I noted: those appear to be drawn from my own lab notebook.
This revelation led me down some ugly paths. Let’s just say that I got into a couple of screaming matches with a couple of friends and former roommates. They all deny stealing, photocopying, and then returning my notebook. One of them even said some pretty unkind things, like nastily stating that my notebook would be the last notebook they’d choose if they wanted to steal good ideas. That was pretty hurtful. But it doesn’t prove her innocence. She might just be concealing her guilt. She was always a little jealous of me. Once, she got drunk and threw herself at me at the department Fourth of July cookout. She did not appreciate being reminded of that fact.
Because I was getting nowhere with my now ex-friends, I decided to try a different tack.
Remember how I mentioned the “coincidence” that the author drew their figures on cocktail napkins from a bar that I’d been to recently? What at first struck me as whimsical chance curdled into nagging suspicion, the more I thought about it. I went to Bar Aleph Nought again to see if I could get any clues there. I was starting to feel like a detective on a case. More like a private investigator, really.
I had a couple of drinks, some really well-crafted and reasonably priced cocktails. I could see myself becoming a regular there, actually. Anyway, very casually I chatted up the bartender, who turned out to be a part-owner, and asked him how long they’ve been open. Their first day open to the public was two days AFTER the initial submission of this manuscript. Which proves to me that the author must be affiliated with the bar, part of management or staff. Maybe even an owner. Or related to the owner. Otherwise, how would they have gotten access to the branded cocktail napkins before the bar was open to the public?
Impossible. Unless they used an unauthorized Hawking-LeGuin device just to steal some cocktail napkins, ha ha. I’m just kidding, I understand that’s a serious allegation, and I’m NOT accusing the author of that. But it may have crossed my mind…
I know that I don’t have conclusive proof of anything. But something here is not right. I understand it’s counter to Journal policy, but I’m begging you: please tell me who the author is. If I know who it is, I can tell you conclusively whether they would’ve had the opportunity to steal my ideas. Maybe it’s a total coincidence. Maybe I’m just crazy. In that case, I fully support publishing the article, pending the minor edits I suggested.
But if I’m right, there could be some serious academic malpractice going on. Maybe even criminal behavior. The problems go far beyond use of a hallucinating LLM.
I don’t make these allegations lightly. Even my therapist, who doesn’t always take my side, agrees it sounds genuinely fishy.
I look forward to your response.
Warmest regards,
L█████ S███████, B.S., M.Sc., M.Div.
P.S.
For the sake of confidentiality, please send your response to me, not to Prof. P████.
from: ls
to: jc_editor
RE: FWD: A decision has been made for JC2057-XXXXXR1 — UPDATE????
Hi [Editor],
It’s been over six weeks from my frame of reference since you submitted this last revise decision to the author. Four weeks since the revision submission deadline you gave them. The minor edits that Reviewer 1 and I requested shouldn’t have taken the author more than a couple of days to fix. I haven’t heard from the Editorial Office with the information I requested. I have been waiting.
I’ll just come right out and ask: are you deliberately withholding the author’s final revision from me? Have you even begun the investigation that I requested into the author’s conduct? What are you trying to hide?
I’ve been going to Bar Aleph Nought every day. I’ve been waiting for him to come in. It is a him, right? Isn’t it? He writes in a masculine style. Menacing. I nurse a drink or three and watch for him out the front windows. Sometimes I think I see him walking down Wells Street. I don’t understand the mechanism, but I know that I would recognize him if I laid eyes on him. My nemesis. My plagiarizer.
My enemies have been corralling their forces against me. Prove to me that you aren’t on their payroll. Tell me what I need to know. Tell me the author’s name!
L█████ S███████, B.S., M.Sc., M.Div.
P.S.
I really wish you would just reply to me directly instead of always sending the submission updates to Prof. P████. It’s annoying. And I haven’t ruled him out as a suspect, yet.
from: jc_editor
to: rp
FWD: Conflict of Interest: Supervised Review Request Withdrawn
Dear Prof. P████,
Thank you for agreeing to review MS#JC2057-XXXXX. Please note that our editorial staff have surfaced a conflict of interest between the Author of the manuscript and your graduate student who was preparing the supervised review.
While the full details of the situation must remain confidential per Journal policy, we can share that the Author did not submit the manuscript in good faith. The Author, making unauthorized and unethical use of chronokinetic technology, submitted their article from a future frame of reference in order to extract free editorial services before submitting to the Journal in their own present frame of reference. However, the Author’s frame of reference is a lateral, noncontiguous future adjacent to our own, which averts the risk of paradox but does generate irritating splinter universes that are a headache for everyone involved.
Out of an abundance of caution, the Editorial Board’s Ethics Subcommittee is barring the Author from ever publishing in or reviewing for the Journal ever again. Unfortunately, although we acknowledge that the Author and the graduate student reviewer are technically from separate timelines, we cannot enforce the ban on the Author without also banning the graduate student, who may become a version of the Author one day.
We apologize for this inconvenience but urge you to refer to the relevant section published by the Committee on Publication Ethics. COPE is clear on these guidelines; while this was a new situation for our Journal, this form of transtemporal misconduct has been experienced by other peer publications, and we defer to COPE’s guidance in this matter. Our submission guidelines have been updated to reflect this emerging nuisance.
Thank you for your time and attention. We regret the outcome, but hope that you and your graduate student will continue to subscribe to the Journal. Please note that this decision is final.
Kindly,
The Editorial Board
Journal of Chronokinetics
from: ls
to: jc_editor
RE: FWD: Conflict of Interest: Supervised Review Request Withdrawn
Wait. Wait. I don’t understand.
I just think there’s been some kind of mistake. Can we meet to discuss this in person? I think that would be helpful.
I’ll come to you. I don’t have anything left keeping me here, anymore.
L█████
from: jc_editor
to: rp
FWD: RE: FWD: Conflict of Interest: Review Request Withdrawn
Thank you for your message. We must reiterate, with regret, that our decision is final and may not be appealed.
Kindly,
The Editorial Board
Journal of Chronokinetics
[file missing. see next page.]
from: jc_editor
to: rp
RE: FWD: RE: FWD: Conflict of Interest: Review Request Withdrawn
Thank you for your message. Per our previous communications and COPE guidelines, the Board’s decision is final. Kindly desist.
Kindly,
The Editorial Board
Journal of Chronokinetics
[file missing. see next page.]
from: jc_gc
to: rp; ls
RE: FWD: RE: FWD: RE: FWD: Conflict of Interest: Review Request Withdrawn
Thank you for visiting the Journal’s Editorial Office. We regret that no one was available to meet with you, and we hope that your interaction with Security was satisfactory. The Journal has graciously decided to cover the cost of the broken windows and declined to pursue legal action for the incident.
The Editorial Board’s decision is final.
Office of General Counsel
Journal of Chronokinetics
Thanks for reading! “Single Blind” can be found here:
ICYMI: Please submit to my writing contest! Deadline is July 1. Thanks to some generous donors, the first place prize will be $200! Details can be found in the post below:
very much enjoyed your writing. even in the future grad students languish and journals gate keep
“in order to extract free editorial services” as a premise might have solicited a chuckle from sf author Clifford Simak, except that he didn’t do satire on contemporary society.