Review Acceptance Disputes Thread

[Tiffany Dowell]

I am creating this thread for reviewers and the teams that accept or reject reviews to discourse and hash out the OBVIOUS conflict that keeps popping up on this site.

Allow me to explain why. Authors can in fact SEE this thread, and maybe making these discrepancies known will either

1. Show that the gatekeeping of review acceptance or rejection is in fact doing its job up to snuff, and therefore the reviews that the authors spend hundreds of dollars to potentially recieve are professionally done, competitive with OBC's conglomerate rivals, and worth the investment for them

OR

2. Written and accepted by unqualified, incompetent, and expensive sub-par quality.

If we want this endeavor to be a success, then it has to be quantified.

HOPEFULLY, this thread will make it transparent WHO the qualified reviewers are, WHO the qualified review checkpoint "staff" are, and who those who are NOT are. In response, perhaps that team could then be re-worked and re-staffed with more competent and qualified people, thus increasing the WHOLE OBC's validity.

Might I add that if OBC itself does not have build-in self quality checks, trust tanks, and with trust goes investment, the AUTHOR'S investment. We at OBC are in fact providing a service, and in order to retain both reputation and the bottom line, that service needs to be reputable. Transparency will weed out WHO is a kink in the system to that end, and who is beneficial to it.

Hopefully, this will solve the problem. I see no reason that that would be problematic if there is nothing shady that that transparency would bring to light. Like many, we came here to provide a quality service that we enjoy providing and thus attach our own reputation to the reputation of OBC. Our focus should be on internal quality over profit, because with quality, that investment should naturally flow. No one pays for a clunker car, as the metaphor goes, and no one wants to be known as the guy that produced a clunker. Whether or not the discourse is spearheaded and gotten ahead of by OBC itself, it is in fact happening, and visibly. The same way that we review authors and books, and then promote (or demote) them, OBC as an entity is in fact being reviewed, promoted, or demoted in reputation already. I have been here only a short while, but I believe that this is something that our community needs to meet head on, not sweep under the rug, if we are to be successful in what we set out to do here.

After all, TrustPilot will tell the story either way, and it's only a tab away from OBC. I've seen indication that Scott does in fact respond and work on issues with OBC, and stories that he doesn't. I have no personal experience with this myself, but I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt that he did not set out to be a hack, and if he is in fact working hard to keep this place legitimate and reputable, we owe it to ourselves, our own reputations, and this service to assist in that if deserved.