In the context of peer review it’s common, or at least not uncommon, for reviewers to be anonymous. Personally I think it should be completely blind both directions to promote maximum objectivity.
Whether that applies at all in this case is a separate matter.
True, but it's also the norm that peer reviewer's feedback is provided to allow the author the address issues. In Timnit's account, she received neither identities nor the feedback itself.
A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week...
And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored.
According to her account, she was not given the feedback when she was told that the paper had to be retracted. After discussion, she was told her manager would read her the feedback without telling her who wrote it or what process was followed.
This is different than a normal peer review process that, anonymous or not, aims to provide feedback to the author so they can incorporate it.
Sure that’s a fair point but asking for the reviewers to be identified is way out of bounds. What possible legitimate reason could she have for that request?
I think it was less "who said this?" and more "who was the reviewer, how were they chosen, what guidelines did they follow?"
Peer review in Academia is anonymous but has relative guarantees that the reviewer will have sufficient knowledge to judge your paper, won't be an academic rival out to skewer your work, and is generally capable of being a disinterested judge. As many others have pointed out here, Google doesn't do peer review in the academic sense, they do pre-publication review, almost always on short notice, for the purposes of protecting IP, mainly.
So imagine you're called in and told to retract your paper on substantive grounds provided by an anonymous reviewer whose feedback is sufficiently bad for you that you don't get a chance to amend your paper, it's just retracted, full stop. You can't have their written feedback, but after you kick up a fuss, you'll be granted a recitation of the feedback that won't change anything about the fate of your paper.
All this in the context of review that's normally a rubber stamp when trade secrets aren't involved.
Demanding to know who torpedoed your paper in an extraordinary way doesn't seem so unreasonable.
Good point. Asking who gave the feedback could mean their qualifications but be interpreted as their names. Or their qualifications might be enough to identify them.
This tweet may explain why the reviewers do not want to be confronted:
> Nothing like a bunch of privileged White men trying to squash research by marginalized communities for marginalized communities by ordering them to STOP with ZERO conversation. The amount of disrespect is incredible. Every time I think about it my blood starts boiling again.
