Technology and the academic world

Yes technology effects even the academic world. An announcement from the American Economic Association:

On April 15, 2011, the Executive Committee voted to drop “double-blind” refereeing for the Association’s journals. The change to “single-blind” refereeing (the referees’ identity remains undisclosed) is effective July 1, 2011. Easy access to search engines increasingly limits the effectiveness of the double-blind process in maintaining author anonymity. Double-blind refereeing also increases administrative costs of the journals and makes it harder for referees to identify an author’s potential conflicts of interest arising, for example, from consulting.

It will be interesting to see if there are any changes to the papers accepted by the AEA's journals from now on and thus it will allow a test of the effectiveness of double-bind refereeing.